Bedrock Robotics raises $600 million in a Series C co-led by CapitalG and Emergence Capital, valuing the two-year-old company at $4.1 billion. Excavators retrofitted with its self-driving kit now work commercially at a Nevada water treatment facility and at Texas and Zachry Construction sites. CEO Boris Sofman says the funding will expand deployments.
Kevin Weil, formerly OpenAI's science lead, launches Warp Sciences, an AI startup training robots to synthesize and test drug compounds. Weil says the company raised $215 million at an $865 million valuation, led by Lightspeed. He aims to reshore lab work now outsourced to Chinese contractors such as WuXi AppTec.
NVIDIA researchers release ASPIRE v1.0, an Apache-2.0 framework that treats robot learning as skill refinement rather than gradient descent. NVlabs reports 99% success on 80 LIBERO-Pro tasks and Rubik's Cube solving, with Claude Opus 5.5 reaching 97 to 100% across three benchmarks. It warns generated code runs without a security sandbox.
Dream Labs releases Dream-1, a World Action Model the company says controls bimanual parallel-gripper robots it has never seen, with no fine-tuning. It is offered through a public API at $3 per hour, or $2 per hour for Dream-1-flash. Dream Labs also says it has raised $90M in seed funding.
Artificial Analysis releases AA-Robotics v0.1, a research preview testing frontier language models on controlling a 6-axis robot arm across eight tabletop tasks. GPT-6 Astra leads with a score of 69, averaging 30 minutes and $16.36 per task. The firm says models run about 100 times slower than humans.
Physical Intelligence opens a beta of its Pi API, which lets developers upload data, fine-tune Pi models on the company's compute, and run inference through a hosted gateway. The company says Almond iterated for four days with the API to get a model that deburrs spacers on its Axol dual-arm robot.
DeepSeek has agreed to lead the seed round for Winverse AI, a robot AI start-up founded by former Tencent scientist Hu Han, Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar. The round would value Winverse at about $400mn, with Meituan's Long-Z also committed. The deal is not final.
NVIDIA's NVlabs releases Long-WAM, long-context world-action models for robot policies, with an arXiv paper posted Oct. 8. The models support robot-video pretraining and deployment on YAM, Franka and Unitree G1 hardware. The repo says LongLive 2.0's NVFP4 2-step model reaches 45.7 FPS on one GB200, measured excluding VAE decoding.
Runway launches Runway Ads, an AI agent that creates, edits, publishes and tracks ad campaigns, alongside Praxis-1, an open-weight robotics world-action model, as CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela projects fully world-model-powered physical-AI deployments in 12 to 18 months.
AMD agrees to acquire spatial-intelligence startup World Labs for about $8.2 billion in stock, with co-founder Fei-Fei Li set to become executive vice president and chief scientist reporting to CEO Lisa Su after the deal closes by the end of 2026.