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

Salesforce is a San Francisco enterprise software company founded in 1999 that sells customer relationship management software by subscription, and has grown into one of the largest business software firms in the world.

EnterpriseAgents & tool useData & datasets

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

Snowflake is a cloud data platform company that also builds its own open language models; its Arctic model pairs a dense transformer with a sparse mixture of experts and shipped under Apache 2.0.

Large language modelsEnterpriseData & datasets

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

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

The State Council is China's Central People's Government: the executive body of the highest organ of state power and the highest organ of state administration, led by a Premier who assumes overall responsibility.

ChinaEnterpriseInteroperability

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

Tencent is a Chinese internet company founded in 1998, known for QQ, WeChat and video games. Since 2023 its Hunyuan model line has been its main AI effort, later branded Hy.

Large language modelsChinaConsumer apps

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

T-Head Semiconductor is Alibaba's chip design unit, founded in 2018. It has released the Hanguang 800 AI inference chip, the Yitian 710 server CPU and the Zhenwu PPU AI processor, which Alibaba uses at scale for its Qwen models.

ChinaEnterpriseHardware & compute

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

T. Rowe Price is a US asset management firm founded in 1937, reporting $1.86 trillion in assets under management and known for retirement and target-date investing. It was also a significant investor in Anthropic's $13 billion Series F round.

EnterpriseConsumer appsCloud

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