University of Texas spinout Apptronika maker of humanoid robots for Google DeepMind among others, announced Wednesday that it has reopened its Series A to raise a total of $935 million for the round.
While the company did not disclose the valuation, TechCrunch has separately learned that its post-money valuation is now around $5.3 billion.
Apptronik previously announced a $350 million Series A a year ago, but demand was so strong, the company said, that it expanded the round to $415 million. It has now raised another $520 million from past investors Google, Mercedes-Benz and B Capital, along with some new investors.
While it may sound like the startup is selling off bigger and bigger pieces of itself for the Series A price, that’s not exactly the case. The company says its investors have paid progressively more for stock in each subsequent expansion — valuing it at about three times its initial Series A valuation of about $1.75 billion, according to PitchBook.
Why not just call it the B Series? The company says it’s still in the early stages of development and wasn’t actively seeking funding — rather, it was facing incoming interest, says a source close to the company.
Fair enough. Another $520 million in a year, especially at a higher valuation, would be hard to turn down, particularly for technology as expensive to manufacture as bipedal robots. Closely watched competitor Figure AI, for example, had raised nearly $2 billion in total since its founding in 2022 before announcing an additional $1 billion round last fall.
Part of the excitement about Apptronik is that it has in collaboration with Google DeepMindas well as GXO and Mercedes-Benz, to offer what the industry calls embedded artificial intelligence – robots capable of sensing their environment and taking physical action based on logic, rather than simply following fixed instructions. The robot is being built for tasks such as unloading trailers, picking warehouse inventory and tending machinery, the company says.
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
|
June 23, 2026
Despite retaining the early-stage funding label, Apptronik is no Johnny-come-lately in this field. As we’ve previously reported, his humanoid work dates back to 2013, three years before the company was officially founded. That’s when members of the Human Centered Robotics Lab from the University of Texas at Austin competed in the NASA-DARPA Robotics Challengeworking on a robot called Valkyrie. Since then, the space agency has maintained a partnership with Apptronik as the company has prepared its own humanoid robot, called Apollo.
