The struggle to be first in humanoid robots is the space race of our time, says Apptronik CEO Jeff Cardenas, who also says that major upgrades are coming to Apptronik’s appropriately-named Apollo robot in 2025. “It is just amazing to me to hear that there’s a hundred companies working on humanoid robots,” Cardenas told me recently on the TechFirst podcast. “Investors that I talked to two years ago that said humanoids don’t make sense. They didn’t want to pay attention to hardware. Now they have a humanoid thesis and hardware’s the name of the game.” Apptronik closed a massive $403 million funding round early this year with blue-chip investors including tech titans like Google, massive automotive brand Mercedes-Benz, and venture heavyweights such as B Capital and Capital Factory. The company has also partnered with $30 billion global manufacturing giant Jabil to ramp up production capabilities and achieve mass scalability. “One of the things that we realized was that if we really are going to ramp to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of units, we need to really learn about how to do manufacturing right and do it at scale,” Cardenas told me.

Full report : Humanoid Robots Is The ‘Space Race Of Our Time,’ Says Apptronik CEO Jeff Cardenas.

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