The Robot Investor

The robot industry's annual census is out, and the big money is still in boring robots. The International Federation of Robotics' World Robotics 2026 report counts a record five million industrial robots in factories worldwide, with more than 600,000 installed in 2025. China took 59 percent of installs, and the U.S. passed Japan to become the second-largest market at almost 38,500 units. T...

Medtronic (NYSE: MDT) is best known for pacemakers and insulin pumps, but its Hugo surgical robot is the first major challenger to Intuitive's da Vinci in the U.S. in more than twenty years. In this deep dive we place Medtronic in Layer 7 of the robotics stack, medical and surgical robotics, and ask the question casual investors need answered: is this a robotics stock, or a robotics option inside...

The week robotics investing got concrete. On September 22, Cognex (NASDAQ: CGNX) agreed to acquire RealSense — the depth-camera business Intel founded in 2014 and spun out in 2025 — for approximately $500 million in cash, plus a $56.5 million retention program and about $50 million in stock grants. Cognex expects RealSense to generate $80–90 million of revenue in 2026 and sizes robotic perception...

Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM) sits on Layer 2 of the robotics stack — processing and edge compute, the silicon brains inside the machine. On September 23, 2026, Qualcomm agreed to acquire PickNik, the Boulder, Colorado company that stewards MoveIt, the open-source motion-planning framework that a very large share of the world's research and commercial robot arms are built on. Terms were...

Skild AI is a three-year-old Pittsburgh startup building what it calls an "omni-bodied" AI brain — one model meant to run any robot, from humanoids to warehouse arms, without retraining for every new task. It sits in the software and AI-platform layer of the robotics stack, the same "brain, not body" bet the show explored with Dyna Robotics. Ten months after its first commercial deployment, Skild...

This week on The Robot Investor, hosts Elena and Theo cover China's securities regulator tightening scrutiny of humanoid robot IPOs after Unitree Robotics' stock cratered 44 percent from its August debut high, wiping out roughly $30 billion in value and putting IPO hopefuls like Deep Robotics and Leju Robot under a higher bar for recurring revenue. UBTech's first home-delivered U1 comp...

A casual-investor deep dive on 1X Technologies, the Norwegian-American humanoid robot maker building NEO, a $20,000 home robot designed to fold laundry, load the dishwasher, and handle chores — a full-stack humanoid, like Figure AI and Tesla's Optimus, but aimed at houses instead of factories. The hook: SoftBank is reportedly in talks for a controlling stake at a $6 billion valuation, the late...

Vishay Precision Group (NYSE: VPG) makes precision resistors, strain gauges, load cells, and force and torque sensors — the components that let machines, and increasingly robots, measure weight, pressure, and touch. That puts it on Layer 3 of the robotics stack: actuation and precision motion. VPG stock surged more than 260% over the past year on hopes it supplies force and torque sensors to an un...

This week on The Robot Investor, hosts Elena and Theo break down a rough quarter for Serve Robotics, whose Uber delivery volume fell for the first time in 17 quarters, forcing the company to slash its 2026 revenue guidance from $26 million to as low as $9 million — and send the stock down double digits. AeroVironment lands its first international order for the LOCUST directed-energy counter-drone...

A casual-investor deep dive on Unitree Robotics (Shanghai STAR Market: 688836), the Hangzhou maker of quadruped and humanoid robots — Layer 10 of our robotics stack, full-stack humanoids and consumer robotics. We first covered Unitree in June as a private, unlisted company. Now it's public, and the ride has been extreme: an August 19, 2026 debut that opened 629% above its IPO price and closed up 4...

Oceaneering International (NYSE: OII) runs the largest fleet of work-class underwater robots on Earth — 250 systems, on 82 of the world's 139 contracted floating rigs, a 59% share — and almost nobody calls it a robotics stock. This is our first episode on Layer 9 of the robotics value chain: marine and specialty robotics. Elena and Theo unpack what a remotely operated vehicle actually is and w...

The week robotics investing got quieter — and more informative. Mech-Mind Robotics listed in Hong Kong on September 1st at HK$101.70 a share, the top of its range, raising about US$300 million at a market capitalisation of roughly HK$12.71 billion. The Hong Kong retail tranche was covered 3,835 times across more than 252,000 applications, and the stock still opened around its offer price — the exa...

UiPath (NYSE: PATH) sits on Layer 4 of the robotics stack — software, simulation and AI platforms — and it is the episode we did specifically to clear up a misunderstanding. UiPath sells robotic process automation: software "robots" that click, read and type their way through back-office work like invoice processing, claims and compliance checks. There is no hardware. No arms, no sensors...

One week after the most extreme stock debut this show has ever covered, the reckoning arrived. Unitree Robotics fell roughly 45% from its Shanghai debut in four sessions — closing at 603 yuan on August 24, down 10.3% on the day and more than 44% below its first-day high of 1,100 yuan — after a valuation that touched $66 billion and then shed about $30 billion. Reuters reported the selloff has trig...

Teradyne, Inc. (NASDAQ: TER) owns Universal Robots and Mobile Industrial Robots — two of the best-known names in industrial automation, sitting squarely in Layer 5 of the robotics stack. It is also, right now, one of the hottest AI semiconductor stocks on the market, up more than 210% over the past 52 weeks. This episode asks whether it is a robotics stock at all. On July 28, 2026, Teradyne report...

XPeng Inc. (NYSE: XPEV; HKEX: 9868) is a Guangzhou smart-EV maker that sits on Layer 6 of the robotics stack — mobile and autonomous vehicle robotics — and is now pushing hard into Layer 10, full-stack humanoids. On August 24, 2026, XPeng carved its robotics business into a standalone subsidiary called Dogotix and raised more than US$900 million at a post-money valuation above US$6.3 billion, whic...

This episode of The Robot Investor is a casual-investor deep dive on Dyna Robotics — and it is the show's first on a company with no ticker at all. Founded in 2024 in Redwood City by Caper AI's Lindon Gao and York Yang (Caper sold to Instacart for $350M in 2021) alongside DeepMind and NVIDIA alum Jason Ma, Dyna builds robotic foundation models: Layer 4 of the value chain, the brain rather...

Unitree Robotics became the first pure-play humanoid robot maker to trade publicly, and the market lost its composure. Shares priced at 150.8 yuan opened at 1,100 on Shanghai's Star Market on August 19, spiking as much as 629% intraday and closing the first day up 487% — roughly 358 billion yuan, about 53 billion dollars, or around 210 times last year's sales and close to 1,300 times earni...

Novanta Inc. (NASDAQ: NOVT) sits at Layer 3 of the robotics stack — actuation and precision motion. It doesn't sell robots; it sells the encoders, precision motors, servo drives, force-torque sensors and robotic tool changers that go inside other companies' machines. Founded in Massachusetts in 1968 as General Scanning and renamed Novanta in 2016, it's the kind of company you've ne...

Unitree's Shanghai Star Market offering just got oversubscribed more than 8,000 times by retail investors, with trading expected to begin around August 17-21 — Elena and Theo break down what the number does (and doesn't) tell you about the actual business, and bring in Goldman Sachs' new field research showing China's humanoid supply chain is building capacity for up to a million r...

Amazon has deployed more than a million robots across its network since 2012 — the largest commercial robotics fleet on earth — and earns exactly nothing from selling them. In this deep dive, Elena and Theo place Amazon at Layer 10 of the robotics stack, the full-stack operator layer, and work through what that actually means for a casual investor. The bull case: a business compounding at scale (Q...

Aeva Technologies (NASDAQ: AEVA) sits on Layer 1 of the robotics stack — perception and sensing — with FMCW "4D" lidar that measures velocity as well as position for every pixel it sees. On August 5 the company reported Q2 2026 results and the stock soared: revenue of $6.1M beat estimates, gross margin turned positive for the first time, and Aeva announced a surprise new Optical Connecti...

The most important humanoid robot IPO ever just got a price. This week Elena and Theo break down Unitree pricing its Shanghai Star Market listing at 150.8 yuan per share — a roughly $9 billion valuation, 45% above its own floor — with AI lab DeepSeek joining as a strategic investor, subscriptions opening August 10. But the same filing shows first-quarter profit down 52.6% as spending ramps, and 13...

Zebra Technologies just delivered one of the cleanest quarters of earnings season — sales up 20.4% to $1.56 billion, adjusted EPS up 76% to $6.35 (nearly $2 above Wall Street's estimate), raised full-year guidance, and a 20% single-day stock jump to an all-time high. In this deep dive, Elena and Theo place Zebra on Layer 1 of the robotics stack — perception and sensing — as the company behind the...

Mobileye Global (NASDAQ: MBLY) sits at Layer 6 of the robotics value chain — mobile and autonomous-vehicle robotics. Its EyeQ chips sit behind the windshield of tens of millions of cars, powering automatic emergency braking, lane keeping and hands-free highway driving, and it shipped roughly 10 million units last quarter alone. In January 2026 it spent about $900 million buying Mentee Robotics, an...