XDOF, a robotics data startup that emerged from stealth less than three months ago, entered late-stage talks for a Series B led by 8VC at a valuation of about $1.2 billion. The company said its annualized revenue is approaching $50 million, after a $70 million Series A in June. If the deal closes, it will change XDOF’s funding plans sooner than expected to support expansion of its data pipelines, collection tools, and annotation systems.
The article argues that humanoid robots lack a ChatGPT-like equivalent that the public can reliably access, and that most progress is hard to verify because it is shown mainly through demo videos. It cites Waymo’s 220 million miles to illustrate how edge-case handling can still fail in the real world. It then lays out a checklist of technical hurdles—especially around dexterous hands, perception, planning, context, autonomy, safety, reliability, mobility, battery life, and heat—that must be solved for broadly capable robots to move from demos to dependable work.
OpenAI has started offering rides in its Cybercab robotaxis, a two-seat vehicle with no steering wheel and no direct human intervention. Tesla is authorized to operate 314 vehicles in Texas for paid rides. Paid passenger service begins under this authorization for the steering-wheel-free robotaxi.
Nscale signed a multi-year AI cloud agreement with humanoid robotics company Figure and also took an undisclosed equity stake. The deal commits at least $3.5 billion in AI cloud compute, with capacity to scale past $6 billion, and targets initial systems for the second half of 2027. Figure gains priority compute and orchestration support from Nscale for its robotics training and models, while the partnership expands Figure’s ability to run large-scale training needed for robot shifts.
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