Companies

Pony.ai is an autonomous driving company founded in Fremont, California, in late 2016. It runs robotaxi, robotruck and personal-vehicle businesses on a common "virtual driver" system, and operates in both California and China.

ChinaEnterpriseRobotics

Poolside is an AI company building models for software work; in April 2026 it released the Laguna M.1 and Laguna XS.2 models and pool, the agent runtime behind its reinforcement learning.

Large language modelsEnterpriseDeveloper tools

Reka AI is an AI research lab building models and infrastructure for the physical AI era. Its releases include reka-flash-3, a 21-billion-parameter reasoning model, and Reka Edge, a 7-billion-parameter vision-language model designed to run on devices at the edge.

Large language modelsMultimodalRobotics

Rethink Robotics was a Massachusetts robotics company whose humanoid robot Baxter, unveiled in 2012, was designed to work safely alongside people on factory production lines.

EnterpriseRoboticsIndustrial automation

The RoboCup Federation runs an international robot-soccer initiative and competition whose stated aim is to develop robotic players able to beat a human World Cup champion team.

Research historyRoboticsScience

Runway is a New York-based AI video company founded in 2018. It co-released Stable Diffusion in 2022, has built a series of video models from Gen-1 to Gen-4.5, and in February 2026 raised $315 million at a $5.3 billion valuation.

EnterpriseMultimodalGenerative models

Sanctuary AI is a Vancouver-based robotics company founded in 2018 that aims to build human-like intelligence for general-purpose robots. Its humanoid robot Phoenix was named to TIME's Best Inventions of 2023 list, and the company reported its first commercial deployment that year.

EnterpriseRoboticsHumanoid robots

Skild AI is a robotics company founded in 2023 that builds a general-purpose robotic foundation model, intended to act as a single brain across many robot bodies and tasks such as manipulation, locomotion and navigation.

EnterpriseDeep learningFoundation models

SRI International is a non-profit research institute in Menlo Park, California, founded in 1946 as the Stanford Research Institute. Its AI Center built Shakey the robot, and its later work led to Siri.

Research historyRoboticsComputer vision

Stability AI is a British generative-AI company founded in 2019 in London. It is known for releasing the open-weight Stable Diffusion image model in 2022, and it has since faced copyright lawsuits over training data.

Open sourceGenerative modelsCreative tools

The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, started by John McCarthy in 1963, is associated with the Stanford arm robot design, the Stanley self-driving car and the SAIL programming language.

Research historyRoboticsComputer vision

Stanford University is a private research university in California, home to the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and the Institute for Human-Centered AI, which publishes the AI Index.

Research historyDeep learningRobotics

Talen Energy is an independent power producer created in 2015 from the spinoff of PPL's competitive generation business, later taken private by Riverstone, restructured through bankruptcy, and now a nuclear power supplier to Amazon.

Hardware & computeCloudIndustrial automation

Tesla is the American company behind Optimus, a humanoid robot first shown as a concept at its 2021 AI Day; later reports describe pilot production lines, plans for volume manufacturing and a target unit cost below US$20,000.

EnterpriseProduct historyRobotics

Toyota Motor Corporation is an automaker that in 2015 announced the Toyota Research Institute, a separate company focused on artificial intelligence and robotics, backed by about $1 billion over five years.

EnterpriseRoboticsIndustrial automation

Tsinghua University's Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR) is an applied AI research institute set up under Zhang Yaqin, targeting the fourth industrial revolution through autonomous driving, AI plus IoT and brain-inspired intelligence.

Research historyChinaIndustrial automation

Uber ATG was Uber's self-driving unit. After a fatal 2018 crash with a pedestrian that the NTSB traced to a distracted safety operator and weak safety oversight, Uber sold the group to Aurora in December 2020.

Research historyRoboticsSafety & governance

UBTECH Robotics is a robot company founded in March 2012 that moved from small humanoid robots to full-size industrial humanoids, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2023, and began mass production delivery of its Walker S2 robot in 2025.

ChinaEnterpriseRobotics

Unimation was the Connecticut company founded in 1961 by George C. Devol and Joseph F. Engelberger that built the first Unimate robot and later the PUMA series.

Research historyProduct historyRobotics

A Chinese robotics company established in Hangzhou in 2016 that designs and builds quadruped and humanoid robots, selling them at both low starting prices and industrial contract scale.

ChinaRoboticsHardware & compute