Apptronik

Apptronik is an Austin-based humanoid robotics company and University of Texas spinout that raised $935 million at a $5 billion valuation in February 2026, backed by Google, Mercedes-Benz, B Capital, PEAK6, AT&T Ventures, John Deere, and Qatar Investment Authority. Its Apollo humanoid robot is powered by Google DeepMind Gemini 3 and Gemini Robotics AI, enabling it to perform diverse real-world tasks without environment-specific retraining — a key differentiator from training-intensive approaches.

Apollo is commercially deployed at Mercedes-Benz factories delivering assembly kits to production line workers, GXO Logistics, and Jabil. The Google DeepMind partnership gives Apollo the same foundation model AI capabilities powering Google own robotics research — a generalist intelligence layer trained across diverse robot types and tasks.

Apollo weighs 73 kg with a 25 kg payload capacity and features a modular hardware design allowing individual joint replacement, reducing maintenance costs versus competitors requiring full robot replacement. Founded 2016, Apptronik is using its new capital to expand in Austin and prepare Apollo for mass production.

Apptronik's distinguishing bet is that the robot intelligence layer should come from a frontier AI lab rather than be trained in-house. That is the opposite of Figure, which brought model development fully in-house, and the mirror image of Physical Intelligence, which sells the model and builds no robot at all.

In February 2026 Apptronik closed a further $520 million at roughly a $5 billion post-money valuation, taking the Series A it reports as over $935 million in total. In mid-2026 it opened an expanded Robot Park in Austin — a dedicated data-collection and training site where fleets of Apollo 2 run alongside units at customer and partner locations, and the demonstration data collected there feeds back into Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics models.

That arrangement is the practical reason to shortlist Apptronik: capability improvements arrive from a model programme far larger than any single robot company's own data. Buyer note: Apollo is sold through commercial and pilot deployments in logistics and manufacturing rather than off a price list, and a next-generation platform was slated for later in 2026, so timing a purchase against that refresh matters.

Best fit: manufacturers and 3PLs that want a supervised pilot with a defined task rather than general-purpose autonomy.