XPENG’s IRON humanoid robot has walked off its automated assembly line as the company targets mass production and commercial deployments in 2027.
The post XPENG’s IRON Walks Off the Assembly Line: Is Mass Production Next? appeared first on TechRepublic.
XPENG’s IRON humanoid robot has walked off its automated assembly line as the company targets mass production and commercial deployments in 2027.
The post XPENG’s IRON Walks Off the Assembly Line: Is Mass Production Next? appeared first on TechRepublic.
A Redmond, Wash., robotics software startup founded by former Microsoft researchers says its platform can now handle much of the work of getting a robot up and running in a factory, warehouse or other industrial setting, a job that used to take a team of engineers.
General Robotics said Wednesday that advances in GRID, its robot intelligence platform, have cut the process of onboarding a new robot from about a month to as little as two hours. The company calls the approach “Auto Engineering,” with each onboarded robot and diagnosed failure feeding back into the system and speeding up the next deployment.
“Before this moment, it would take us a team of experts to go and execute on behalf of our customers,” said General Robotics CEO and co-founder Ashish Kapoor in an interview. “Clearly non-scalable, clearly very expensive, and clearly will take a long time.”
With Auto Engineering, he said, “we can magnify and accelerate each engineer’s capability.”
Founded in 2023, the company has grown to about 50 employees, primarily engineers. It has raised nearly $34 million, most recently in an April round led by Construct Capital, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Accenture Ventures, Nvidia and Valo Ventures. PitchBook put the size of the round at $25 million; the companies didn’t disclose terms at the time.
Kapoor said General Robotics has roughly a dozen customers — large enterprises across manufacturing, logistics, energy and defense — and revenue in the millions of dollars.
Customers include HTX, the science and technology agency of Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs, which Kapoor said has been working with General Robotics for about a year and a half.
The company’s platform works with robot types including industrial arms, humanoids, quadrupeds, wheeled robots and drones, according to the company.
General Robotics is operating in a competitive and well-funded sector. Physical Intelligence, which builds foundation models for robots, has raised more than $2 billion. Nvidia — an investor in General Robotics, and the maker of the Isaac Sim simulation software built into GRID — is developing its own robot models and deployment tools.
Robot makers build good hardware, Kapoor said, but often lack the expertise to put it to work in a specific setting like a shipping terminal. “That last layer is missing.”
Before co-founding the company, Kapoor spent 17 years at Microsoft, ultimately as general manager of its autonomous systems and robotics research group in Redmond, where he created the open-source drone simulator AirSim. General Robotics co-founders Sai Vemprala (CTO) and Shuhang Chen came from the same Microsoft team.
GeekWire covered the launch in 2023, when it was Scaled Foundations and billed itself as “ChatGPT for robots.” It had five employees at the time, focused on aerial robotics and drones, with backing from Khosla and E14 Fund. It later renamed itself General Robotics.
Nvidia is reportedly moving forward to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The acquisition could help the hardware giant expand and fortify its deep integration with the wider AI industry.
Among other things, Hugging Face is a cloud repository for AI models, similar in some respects to what GitHub is for conventional computer software. Developers and researchers search for models that meet certain criteria, download and run them, and fine-tune them into different variants that then get uploaded back up to Hugging Face.
© Hugging Face / anucha sirivisansuwan via Getty Images
This week on the GeekWire Podcast: What should Liverpool FC fans expect from Jeff Bezos as a member of the storied English Premier League club’s new minority ownership group? We consult the Amazon leadership principles for the answer.
Plus, a tip and an SEC filing lead to a scoop on a former Meta AI director’s new startup, the GeekWire Editorial Board convenes to decide whether Dave Clark’s Auger stays on the GeekWire 200 after moving its HQ to Dallas, and Microsoft quietly semi-retires its AI blob.
Bezos and Liverpool FC
Noosphere and the Form D
Auger and the GeekWire 200
Microsoft and Mico
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A former Meta AI research director has raised $10.25 million for a Seattle-area startup working on what it calls “human-centered physical intelligence” — AI designed to help people interact with and make sense of the physical world, beyond text and images on screens.
A company called Noosphere Labs, led by Kevin Carlberg, disclosed the financing in a Form D filed Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Reached via phone by GeekWire on Monday evening, Carlberg said he wasn’t yet ready to share details about the startup.
Trilogy Equity Partners confirmed that it led the round. One of the directors listed in the Form D filing is Amy McCullough, a managing director at the Bellevue-based venture firm. Madrona, the Seattle VC firm, separately confirmed that it had “major participation” in the round.
Carlberg’s personal website describes him as founder and CEO of a “stealth AI startup focused on physical AI and real-world intelligence.” The company’s website says, “Human-centered physical intelligence. Built for the world we inhabit,” with a “Coming Soon” title.
The website styles the name Noösphere, with two dots over the second “o” signaling that it’s pronounced as a separate syllable: NOH-uh-sfeer. The term dates to the 1920s, describing a sphere of human thought wrapped around the planet the way the biosphere wraps it in life.
Carlberg spent more than five years at Meta, where he led a research team spanning Reality Labs Research and the company’s Fundamental AI Research group, working on physical AI and simulation for wearable computers and virtual and mixed-reality devices.
Before that, he spent eight years at Sandia National Laboratories developing methods to make massive physics simulations run in near-real time for national security applications. He holds a doctorate from Stanford and is an affiliate associate professor of applied mathematics and mechanical engineering at the University of Washington.
Although Carlberg hasn’t publicly detailed what the new startup is building, his research points to the problems he’s been focused on.
In a paper for the NeurIPS conference last year, for example, he and his Meta colleagues built a benchmark for “assistive wearable agents” — smart glasses and similar devices that figure out what a person is trying to do from video, audio and other signals, without being asked.
Noting how little prior work existed, they assembled a dataset from 348 participants to test it. The best AI models produced a relevant answer only 55% of the time, they found. The researchers concluded that current models “remain far from practical usefulness” at the task.
Also listed as a director in the startup’s filing is Tyler Simpson, a Seattle-area software executive who co-founded commute-management startup Luum, spent 11 years at Microsoft, and was most recently a director and technical program manager at Meta, overlapping with Carlberg.
Carlberg left Meta at the end of 2024 and announced on his website that he was taking a sabbatical. He incorporated Noosphere Labs early this year.
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