# The Benchmark Nobody Funded Is Telling the Truth About Physical AI VANTAGE-Bench just exposed a gap in vision-language models that nobody in the pitch decks mentions — and it points at where the next wave of robotics value actually sits. Here is what I believe: the robotics industry'
# Humanoids Meet Their Hardware Ceiling: A Vertical Slice Through Embodied Robotics Agility Robotics' S-4 filing may be the most honest document the humanoid sector has produced. Ahead of its planned SPAC listing, Agility reported $1.8 million in 2025 revenue against a $140 million operating loss (per its
# Maze Weekly Trend — Week in Review, Week Ahead Theme: The infrastructure layer under physical AI is finally being built — but the evaluation stack and co-design tools are running ahead of the hardware. --- 1. The Five Things Worth Remembering This Week 1. The Robot Report's August 2026 top-
Issue #047 — Weekly Trend The TOPS Trap: What China's Jetson Challengers Still Can't Copy By Ken ZHANG (Maze Intelligence) The most important number in robotics edge compute this year is not a TOPS figure. It is a price: $1,799, roughly double the $899 list price
Published 2026-09-02 · Updated 2026-09-07 The Developer Stack: How Low-Cost Bimanual Platforms are Industrializing AI Data Collection Agility Robotics is going public via a SPAC merger with Churchill Capital, a deal reported at a $2.5B valuation (per TechCrunch, June 2026). But the path to general-
# Hebbian Robotics: The Plumbing Behind the Embodiment Boom Hebbian Robotics, a Y Combinator S26 cohort company, recently emerged from stealth with a proposition that lacks the glamour of walking androids or the visceral thrill of autonomous trucks: they build data pipelines for robotics. While the industry headlines fixate on hardware
Published 2026-08-31 · Updated 2026-08-31 Agility Robotics is publicly betting on execution rather than narrative, choosing a SPAC path to scale logistics deployment over the speculative promise of a home butler (TechCrunch, 2026-07-05). That framing — articulated by the CEO himself — signals a pragmatic pivot: away
WEEKEND NOTES Bedrock Robotics’ first operator-free excavator deployments are the perfect cure for my humanoid fatigue. I’ve been staring at my screen for three days, watching yet another generically named bipedal prototype fold a t-shirt or pour a cup of coffee with the enthusiasm of a hungover
The "Unsexy" Pivot: Why Heavy Gear is Eating the Robotics World By Ken ZHANG (Maze Intelligence) The robotics market is undergoing a profound psychological shift. For the last eighteen months, the venture ecosystem has been hypnotized by the siren song of the general-purpose humanoid—a future where
# The Simulation Gap: Why Reality Is Eating Your Robotics Returns Foundation models in robotics are currently enjoying a honeymoon period, fueled by the hype surrounding generative AI and the promise of general-purpose humanoids. But as VCs sift through the decks of the 600+ robot models currently tracked in the
Published 2026-08-27 · Updated 2026-08-31 The Zero-Sensor Shift & The Latency Tax By Ken ZHANG (Maze Intelligence) Silicon may be cheap, but compute is expensive, and in the current robotics funding climate, efficiency is the new currency. This week, the most concrete capital signals were not
# The Operational Digital Twin: Scaling Surgical Validation in Embodied AI Medical robotics is currently grappling with a costly bottleneck: the "sim-to-real" gap. While humanoid manufacturers chase general-purpose utility, the medical sub-sector is undergoing a quiet but radical transformation in how embodied AI is validated.