Munich's RobCo becomes a unicorn the moment its employees start selling

Nothing big in the last 24 hours. Here's what led.

RobCo becomes a robotics unicorn

The Munich maker of modular robot arms passed a $1B valuation, double January's, in a sale of about $40M of mostly employee shares. Sequoia and Lightspeed bought again and Cherry Ventures joined. Its autonomous industrial robot, Alfie, launches commercially in March 2027.

Cheered as a European win. @SebJohnsonUK: "I love seeing secondary sales and I love seeing Europe get more deep tech unicorns." Early backer @christianreber invested at pre-seed, when "few investors were excited about backing hardware companies."

Heat: medium · 173K views, 28 posts

1. OpenAI disputes Adcock's claim that Figure "fired" it

In a Forbes profile of Brett Adcock, OpenAI says the 2025 split came because Figure missed deliverables and wasn't a viable robotics partner. Adcock says Figure was outrunning OpenAI and left to build its own model, Helix.

Few takes. @mikekalilmfg: "there will never be an accepted version of what happened, pick whichever one appeals to you."

Heat: low · 62K views, 3 posts

2. SafeWorld launches to test robots against simulated humans

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Co-founded by Ding Zhao, who leads Carnegie Mellon's Safe AI Lab, it turns incidents, safety standards and robot logs into scenarios and runs thousands of variations with reactive human motion. It raised a $12.2M seed co-led by Shine Capital and a16z Speedrun.

Few takes beyond the launch posts. @bshivarthy quotes Zhao on the business model: "If anyone wants to deploy, they need to pay us." @Tesla_Optimus_K: "The demo robot is fine. The one next to a new hire is the product."

Heat: medium · 133K views, 23 posts

3. Reka's Rho-1 puts text, images, video and robot actions in one model

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A research preview of a 19B omni model that understands and generates all four inside a single neural network.

Interested in the design, waiting for proof. @RobotCaveCom: "The same weights that process a video frame also output motor commands." @shipfrontierai: "no third-party benchmark accompanies the release".

Heat: medium · 115K views, 28 posts · 34 pts on r/accelerate

4. A home-built balancing robot, trained in seven hours on one GPU

A hobbyist's balancing robot runs end-to-end on a neural net trained only in simulation, about 7 hours on a single RTX 3080 at home, with six Xiaomi Cybergear motors and a 200 Hz policy.

Loved, lost hubcap included. r/robotics' top reply: "Awww, that hubcap...." Another: "It's wild that this translate to the real world so well and on not very even ground at that."

Heat: low on X · but 324 pts on r/robotics (45 comments)

T²Mem: a robot policy that learns what to remember

Test-time training gives a single robot policy its own memory, with no extra memory model or annotations. It raises π₀.₅'s average success from 17.93% to 56.83% across 16 memory-dependent RoboMME tasks. It matters because most real chores need a robot to remember what it just did.

DITTO-X: teleoperation that runs both ways

Forward, a person controls a dexterous hand with force and haptic feedback. In reverse, the robot moves the operator's hand to match its own state while its policy runs, so a takeover starts from where the robot is, and each one becomes training data. It matters because taking over a dexterous hand mid-task usually makes the robot drop the object.