Companies

1X Technologies is the robotics company, founded in 2014 as Halodi Robotics, that builds tendon-driven humanoid robots. In October 2025 it announced NEO, a home humanoid priced at $20,000 or by monthly subscription, with first deliveries planned for 2026.

EnterpriseConsumer appsRobotics

Chinese humanoid robotics company founded in February 2023 by Peng Zhihui, a former Huawei "genius youth"; it builds complete robots and their joint modules, and aims to push hardware costs below 200,000 yuan.

ChinaEnterpriseRobotics

Agility Robotics builds Digit, a bipedal mobile manipulation robot, and assembles it at its own factory in Salem, Oregon. The company has tested the robot with Amazon and deployed it with a logistics customer under a multi-year agreement.

EnterpriseRoboticsHumanoid robots

Apptronik is an Austin robotics company spun out of a University of Texas lab in 2016 that builds the Apollo humanoid robot and has signed commercial deals with Mercedes-Benz and GXO Logistics.

EnterpriseRoboticsHumanoid robots

Baidu Research is the research arm of Baidu, built around the Institute of Deep Learning founded in 2013, with laboratories in Beijing and Silicon Valley; in 2014 Andrew Ng became chief scientist in charge of the whole organisation.

Research historyChinaEnterprise

Bell Labs was the research arm of the Bell System, where the transistor, Unix and the C language were created. Yann LeCun's convolutional networks for handwritten digits were developed there, which made it an early home of neural-network research.

Research historyDeep learningHardware & compute

Chinese chip designer founded in 2019 that builds general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) chips and intelligent computing solutions on its self-developed BILI series hardware and BIRENSUPA software, for AI training and inference from cloud to edge.

ChinaEnterpriseDeep learning

A robotics company spun out of MIT in 1992, known for legged and humanoid machines such as BigDog, Atlas, Spot and Handle, and now majority-owned by Hyundai Motor Group.

EnterpriseProduct historyRobotics

A Chinese AI chip company founded in 2016 and listed on the STAR Market in 2020. It designs cloud, edge and endpoint chips, and in 2025 it turned profitable as revenue rose sharply.

ChinaEnterpriseDeep learning

Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has one of the earliest US computer science departments. Its researchers built the Logic Theorist, Sphinx speech recognition and the Deep Blue lineage, and won the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge.

Research historyDeep learningRobotics

CVPR is the annual Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, first held in 1983 and usually held in June in North America. It is known for selective, double-blind review and open-access papers.

Research historyDeep learningComputer vision

NeurIPS is an annual December conference on machine learning and computational neuroscience, founded in 1987 and counted among the most influential meetings in AI research.

Research historyDeep learningScience

A private research university in Ithaca, New York, founded in 1865. It is also where Frank Rosenblatt studied and worked, and where the perceptron — an early learning machine and the first neural network — was developed.

Research historyDeep learningHardware & compute

DNNresearch Inc. was a University of Toronto start-up founded in 2012 by Geoffrey Hinton and two of his graduate students; Google bought it for its deep neural network research.

Research historyEnterpriseDeep learning

Figure AI is a Sunnyvale, California company building general-purpose humanoid robots for industrial work, backed by a large investor group and partnered with BMW Manufacturing.

EnterpriseProduct historyRobotics

Fourier is a Shanghai robotics company founded in 2015 by Gu Jie. It began with rehabilitation robots and exoskeletons, then released the GR-1, GR-2 and GR-3 full-size humanoid robots in 2023, 2024 and 2025.

ChinaRoboticsHumanoid robots

Galbot is a robotics company founded in 2023 that builds general-purpose robots around an embodied foundation model, with its AstraBrain model family, a large-scale data infrastructure and deployed robots in several industries.

ChinaRoboticsHumanoid robots

Google Brain was a deep-learning research team started inside Google's X in 2011. Its cat-recognition experiment, TensorFlow, sequence-to-sequence models and the Transformer made it central to modern AI; it merged into Google DeepMind in 2023.

Research historyDeep learningHardware & compute

A London-headquartered AI research organisation formed in 2023 by merging DeepMind with Google's Brain team, known for AlphaGo, AlphaFold and the Gemini model family.

Research historyDeep learningFoundation models

Google's research division, based in Mountain View and usually dated to 2000, produced the Transformer, BERT and T5 — the work underlying modern large language models.

Large language modelsResearch historyDeep learning