OLogic

05/30/2026

August Robotics has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round led by Big Pi Ventures to scale its fleet of autonomous construction and industrial robots. The company's modular automation platform ingests construction blueprints and coordinates precision robot fleets on-site without human intervention. Its latest product line—developed in partnership with Stanley Black & Decker's DEWALT brand—deploys autonomous, downward-drilling robots to accelerate schedules and eliminate manual bottlenecks at hyperscale AI data center construction sites. The fresh capital will fund global scale-ups across its international hubs, including new R&D and operations centers in Athens and Melbourne.

Read the full report here: https://na2.hubs.ly/H05JhJw0

August Robotics has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round led by Big Pi Ventures as the construction robotics company looks to expand production, increase deployments and develop additional automation systems.

05/29/2026

Ted gave a fantastic presentation at this year’s Robotics Summit & Expo in Boston! His session, “Building Better Robots: Balancing Hardware and Software for Real-World Success,” explored what it really takes to build robots that succeed beyond the prototype stage.

The presentation went incredibly well, and Ted had a great time reconnecting with longtime colleagues while also making new connections throughout the event. A huge thank you to everyone who attended the session and stopped by to chat, we truly appreciate the support!

05/29/2026

Industrial robotics startup Mind Robotics, a spinoff from electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian, has raised an additional $400 million in a funding round led by Kleiner Perkins. This latest financing brings the company's total funding to more than $1 billion since its late 2025 launch and pushes its valuation to $3.4 billion. Founded by Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe under the internal name “Project Synapse,” the Palo Alto-based startup is building a full-stack platform—including foundation models, purpose-built hardware, and deployment infrastructure—focused on automating dexterous, human-like manufacturing tasks. Rivian remains a strategic partner and key shareholder, providing its live vehicle assembly lines as an at-scale data flywheel to train the robots for real-world industrial environments.

Read the full report here: https://na2.hubs.ly/H05Jfkw0

Mind Robotics, which was first revealed in late 2025, has now raised more than $1 billion to date.

05/28/2026

The AI industry is beginning to move beyond chatbots and copilots toward something much more powerful.

Researchers like Yann LeCun argue that today's LLMs are only an intermediate step because predicting language isn't the same as understanding the world. That gap is driving growing interest in "world models": AI systems that maintain structured representations of environments, constraints, relationships, and cause-and-effect interactions.

The shift is already visible across robotics, autonomous driving, industrial automation, and digital twins and for engineering and robotics organizations, it could be one of the defining technology shifts of the next decade.

We broke down what this means and why it matters: https://na2.hubs.ly/H05N-zJ0

05/28/2026

Google DeepMind has integrated its Project Genie 3 world model with Google Street View's massive repository of 280 billion images, allowing users to transform real-world locations into interactive, navigable 3D environments. Announced at Google I/O 2026, the updated 11-billion-parameter autoregressive model can boot a simulation from any real address instead of just a text prompt, serving as an effective scaffold for training AI agents and autonomous vehicles like Waymo in complex physical scenarios. While the system provides robust spatial continuity—remembering and maintaining a coherent space as a character turns 360 degrees—it remains an experimental prototype that lacks full physics awareness, meaning objects can still clip through obstacles. The feature is powered by Google's "Maps Imagery Grounding" technology and is gradually rolling out to Google AI Ultra subscribers, initially limiting real-world location pins to the United States.

Read the full report here: https://na2.hubs.ly/H05JdhS0

Google DeepMind is integrating Street View with Project Genie to create immersive, interactive world simulations for robotics, gaming, and travel, allowing users to explore environments, weather changes, and rare scenarios.

05/27/2026

Opentrons Labworks Inc. has announced the launch of its Compliance Ready Software (Opentrons CRS) for the Opentrons Flex robotic platform, making it the first liquid-handling platform of its kind to align with strict U.S. FDA Title 21 CFR Part 11 regulations. Built for non-GMP regulated environments—including pharma and biotech R&D, preclinical operations, and contract research organizations (CROs)—the software introduces essential compliance safeguards directly at the system level. Key features include role-based access permissions, unique user authentication, and cryptographically signed, tamper-proof audit trails that record every action. Additionally, the software features an irreversible "compliance mode" activation that permanently disables unmonitored interfaces (like SSH and Jupyter access) to ensure electronic record integrity, providing regulated laboratories with an audit-ready benchtop automation option at roughly one-fifth the total cost of traditional enterprise liquid-handling systems.

Read the full report here: https://na2.hubs.ly/H05Jf3K0

05/26/2026

Vertical farming company Oishii has announced the first closing of a $150 million Series C funding round to scale its indoor "Smart Farm" model and expand its robotics integration. Led by SPARX Asset Management, the round brings the company’s total funding to $370 million. While the broader vertical farming sector has cooled amid high-profile bankruptcies, Oishii has maintained momentum by prioritizing unit economics and a premium-first product strategy centered on strawberries. The fresh capital will be used to increase production capacity across 18 states, advance automated harvesting capabilities built upon its 2025 acquisition of Tortuga AgTech, and fund its new Open Innovation Center in Tokyo to accelerate next-generation agricultural R&D.

Read the full report here: https://na2.hubs.ly/H05GjFP0

Oishii is focusing on using its robotic vertical farming technology to grow pesticide-free, non-GMO strawberries

05/25/2026

Mind Robotics, a Palo Alto-based industrial robotics startup spun out of electric vehicle maker Rivian, has raised $400 million in a funding round led by Kleiner Perkins. This latest financing brings the company's total funding to more than $1 billion in less than a year and lifts its valuation to $3.4 billion. Founded by Rivian's RJ Scaringe, Mind Robotics is building a full-stack platform consisting of foundation models, purpose-built hardware, and deployment infrastructure to automate dexterous, reasoning-intensive factory tasks. By leveraging Rivian as both a key shareholder and its first customer, the startup utilizes production data from active automotive assembly lines to feed its "data flywheel" and rapidly scale general-purpose physical AI across the industrial manufacturing ecosystem.

Read the full report here: https://na2.hubs.ly/H05FNw60

Mind Robotics has become a 'unicorn' as it scales toward applying physical AI to manufacturing, starting with partner Rivian.

05/24/2026

Defense autonomy company Havoc has raised $100 million in a Series A funding round to scale its cross-domain "collaborative autonomy" software platform. Bringing its total funding to over $200 million since 2024, the company's software-defined hardware approach is built to bridge land, sea, and air operations, allowing a single military operator to manage and coordinate thousands of diverse autonomous assets simultaneously. Backed by strategic acquisitions of Mavrik and Teleo, alongside partnerships with defense primes like Lockheed Martin and Leidos, Havoc intends to use the capital to accelerate the deployment of its resilient, edge-computing network across highly contested and communications-denied environments.

Read the full report here: https://na2.hubs.ly/H05GgmR0

Havoc claims that defense technology is entering a new era where national security priorities are demanding unified, all-domain autonomy.

05/23/2026

Singapore-based startup Flint has developed a cellulose-enhanced "paper battery" designed to provide a safer, cheaper, and entirely compostable alternative to conventional lithium-ion and alkaline batteries. Unlike previous experimental paper batteries that rely on biological fuel cells, Flint’s technology uses a true rechargeable architecture built on widely available zinc-anode and manganese dioxide-cathode chemistry. By integrating plant-derived cellulose across its casing, separator, electrolyte, and cathode structures, the startup has eliminated hazardous metals like cobalt, toxic PFAS chemicals, and solvent-heavy production methods. Offering an impressive energy density of up to 226 Wh/kg and enduring roughly 1,000 charge cycles, the flexible battery remains completely non-combustible even when punctured or cut in half. Aiming to achieve an exceptionally low production cost of $50/kWh at scale, Flint has launched a pilot partnership with Logitech to test its eco-friendly chemistry in consumer electronics like AAA batteries and wireless peripherals.

Read the full report here: https://na2.hubs.ly/H05Dpp40

Flint says its battery is sustainable, delivers up to 4.2 volts