Humanoid robot startup Apptronik raises $935 million at a valuation of more than $5 billion

Apptronik, a University of Texas spinout that develops humanoid robots such as Google DeepMind, announced Wednesday that it has relaunched its Series A to raise a total of $935 million in a round.

The company has not disclosed its valuation, but TechCrunch has separately learned that the valuation is approximately $5.3 billion after the withdrawal of funds.

Apptronik announced a $350 million Series A a year ago, but the company says demand was so strong that it expanded the round to $415 million. The company has now raised an additional $520 million from previous investors Google, Mercedes-Benz, and B Capital, as well as several new investors.

While it may sound like the startup is selling off an even bigger chunk of its company for its Series A price, that’s not what’s actually happening. The company says investors have paid progressively more for the stock in each subsequent extension, nearly triple its original Series A valuation of about $1.75 billion, according to Pitchbook.

So why not call this a Series B? The company was still in the early stages of development and wasn’t actively seeking funding, but rather was dealing with inbound interest, people close to the company said.

fair enough. It would be hard to ignore that an even higher valuation would cost an additional $520 million a year, especially for a technology as expensive to manufacture as bipedal robots. High-profile competitor Figure AI, for example, has raised nearly $2 billion in total since its founding in 2022 and announced another $1 billion round last fall.

Part of the excitement about Apptronik is that the company is partnering with Google DeepMind, GXO, and Mercedes-Benz to deliver what the industry calls embodied AI (robots that are aware of their environment and can take physical actions based on reasoning rather than simply following fixed instructions). The company says the robots are being developed for tasks such as unloading trailers, picking warehouse inventory and servicing machinery.

Despite holding the early-stage funding label, Apptronik is not a recent johnny in the space. As we previously reported, the origins of the company’s humanoid development date back to 2013, three years before the company was officially founded. Members of the Human Centered Robotics Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin competed in the NASA-DARPA Robotics Challenge and worked to develop a robot called Valkyrie. Since then, the space agency has maintained a partnership with Apptronik, which has developed its own humanoid robot named Apollo.