Issue #6 · November 9, 2026 · Covers Nov 1 to 8, 2026

China blocks SoftBank's ABB Robotics deal, Apple trains a humanoid in simulation, and Agility lists on Nasdaq

China blocked SoftBank's $5.4B purchase of industrial-robot maker ABB Robotics, Apple researchers showed a Unitree G1 that walks into unseen homes at a 91% success rate after training only in simulation, and Agility, the maker of the Digit humanoid robot, closed its SPAC merger (a stock-market listing through a merger with a listed shell company) and began trading on Nasdaq as AGLT on Nov 5 with about $465M raised.

The week at a glance

Markets and policy: ABB says China barred SoftBank's acquisition of ABB Robotics in China, a deal with a $5.375B enterprise value (the value of the business, including debt and excluding cash). ¹
AI labs: Apple's HALO system reaches 91% success over 360 real-world trials in six unseen homes, trained on 300 hours of simulated data. ³
Agility: the merger closed Nov 4 and AGLT began trading on Nov 5 with about $465M raised before expenses. Filings show $1.782M of 2025 sales against a $138.1M net loss. ⁵
Humanoids at work: Xiaomi says its humanoids ran an 8-hour shift sorting car parts, and CNBC reports Amazon has organized a Personal Robotics Group around Fauna's Sprout. ⁸
Funding: Tutor Intelligence ($75M Series B led by a16z), SYNCERE ($11M), Physicl ($10M) and Aformic ($6.95M). Bloomberg says China's robotics fundraising fell to about $1.6B in October. ¹²
Models and open source: AGIBOT's GO-3 Preview, which it says tops three benchmarks, and Baidu's 280B-parameter ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base open weights. ¹⁸

Companies in this issue

1. Markets and policy: China blocks SoftBank's $5.4B ABB Robotics deal

ABB (Nov 5): ABB said SoftBank informed it of a Chinese prohibition on the acquisition of ABB Robotics' business in China, issued by China's Office of the Working Mechanism for Foreign Investment Security Review. The agreement, signed Oct 8, 2025, values the business at an enterprise value of $5.375B (the value of the business, including debt and excluding cash). ABB says it and SoftBank remain in close dialogue and are working constructively on the transaction. ¹
What was at stake: ABB Robotics had about 7,000 employees and $2.3B of 2024 revenue at signing. SoftBank has described the deal as part of a physical AI strategy that includes Berkshire Grey, AutoStore, Agile Robots and Skild AI, other robotics companies in its physical AI strategy. SoftBank said it would announce any decision promptly. ¹²

Why it matters: The ruling applies only to ABB Robotics' China business, but the deal has SoftBank buying the whole carved-out holding company, so it may need to be restructured. As AI and robotics become national security priorities, more cross-border deals are likely to draw regulatory scrutiny.

2. AI labs: Apple trains a humanoid entirely in simulation

Apple (arXiv, Nov 2026): Apple researcher Vladlen Koltun and colleagues published HALO, a humanoid autonomy system trained on 300 hours of vision-language-motion data synthesized across 1,000 procedurally generated homes. Deployed on a modified Unitree G1 with a Mac mini M4 Pro on its back, it achieved a 91% success rate over 360 real-world trials in six unmapped homes. Multi-step chains scored lower, averaging 70% in the real world. Apple says it provides code and videos on the project page. ³⁴
The cost of the data: the paper says generating the corpus took 48 hours on 250 H100 GPUs, with no human teleoperation. Its stated limits: a person still writes each new task, and vision alone gives the robot no sense of contact. ³

Why it matters: Apple is showing a humanoid data pipeline that scales with compute rather than operator hours, which is the opposite bet from Tutor Intelligence and Figure's human-operator rigs. It is a research system on a Unitree body, not an Apple product, and the 70% multi-step result shows chaining skills is still the weak point.

3. Humanoids: Agility goes public

Agility went public: AGLT started trading on Nov 5; the company reported $1.8M in 2025 sales.

The listing (Nov 5): Agility completed its merger with listed shell company Churchill Capital Corp XI and began trading on Nasdaq as "AGLT" on Nov 5. The business combination and related financings raised about $465M before expenses, including a PIPE (a private share sale alongside the listing) led by Foxconn and $100M from share sales received before closing. ⁵
The numbers behind it: Agility's final merger prospectus shows $1.782M of 2025 net sales and a $138.1M net loss. In the first half of 2026, net sales were $174,000, mostly ($121,000) from related parties (people or businesses with close financial or management ties to Agility), and the net loss was $361.9M. ⁶
Digit 5 orders: Agility says it has more than $300M in committed multi-year Digit 5 orders, "subject to contractual milestones, product features and specifications." Early customer access is expected in the first half of 2027 and general availability by the end of 2027. CEO Peggy Johnson told TechCrunch the milestones include throughput, uptime and placement accuracy, and that Digit 5 will be shown at CES 2027. Agility says it has a pipeline of more than 30 prospective customers, and that RoboFab in Salem, Oregon is designed for up to 10,000 robots a year. ⁷
In her words: "Today marks an important milestone for Agility, but the bigger story is what it means for the future of work," said Peggy Johnson, Agility's CEO, in the Nov 5 GlobeNewswire release.

Agility's listing announcement graphic. Image: Agility via GlobeNewswire.

Why it matters: Agility is now the first US-listed pure-play humanoid company, so its quarterly reports will be a public benchmark for humanoid revenue, losses and orders. The gap between about $1.8M of 2025 sales and more than $300M of milestone-dependent orders is the number to track: the orders only turn into revenue if Digit 5 hits its throughput, uptime and accuracy targets in 2027.

Humanoids at work: Xiaomi's 8-hour shift and Amazon's home-robot group

Xiaomi (Nov 3): Xiaomi Tech posted video of its humanoids working an 8-hour shift at the center-console side-cover sorting workstation in its EV factory, and Xiaomi says the robots detected and corrected anomalies on their own. Electrek notes that Xiaomi did not say how many parts were sorted, the success rate over the shift, how often a person stepped in, or how the robots were powered. In March Xiaomi reported a 90.2% success rate over three hours on a nut-installation task, and says it reached 98% by July. ⁸
Amazon (Nov 8): CNBC reported that Amazon has organized a Personal Robotics Group around the 3.5-foot Sprout humanoid from Fauna Robotics, which Fauna said on March 24 had joined Amazon. Amazon is hiring for a "new-to-world robot product," based on reviewed job postings. Amazon gave no design, price or release date. ⁹
Samsung and Hyundai (Nov 9): Seoul Economic Daily reports that the two groups hold their first top-management exchange on Nov 9, with memory supply for Hyundai's Atlas humanoid on the agenda. It says Hyundai Motor Group plans to build 30,000 Atlas units a year in the US from 2028, and cites Counterpoint Research projecting humanoid DRAM demand up 20-fold by 2030 versus this year. ¹⁰

Why it matters: Xiaomi's 8-hour shift is a longer run than the three-hour test it reported in March, but without a success rate or intervention count it cannot be compared with Agility's record of more than 100,000 totes moved at GXO. Amazon turning Fauna into a standalone group signals that a consumer humanoid is now a product line at a company with a failed first attempt (Astro) behind it. The Atlas memory talks show where the supply chain squeeze is moving: from motors to chips.

4. Funding: Tutor Intelligence raises $75M from a16z for robots rented by the hour

Bar chart of four robotics raises disclosed Nov 2 to 6, 2026, totaling about 103 million dollars: Tutor Intelligence 75 million Series B led by a16z, SYNCERE 11 million pre-seed, Physicl 10 million seed led by Inovia, Aformic 6.95 million seed led by Veteran Ventures — Disclosed USD amounts. Agility's roughly $465M SPAC raise is covered in section 3 and not shown. Sources: Tutor Intelligence release (Yahoo Finance) and a16z, Business Wire (SYNCERE), TechCrunch (Physicl), The Next Web (Aformic), linked below. Chart by AI & Humanoid Robotics Weekly.

Tutor Intelligence (Watertown, Massachusetts) raised a $75M Series B (a later startup funding round) led by investment firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), bringing total capital raised to $117M. Tutor rents warehouse robots by the hour and uses human remote operators to train its robot model. a16z says Tutor plans to have more than 1,000 robots under contract by the end of 2027, that nearly a third of customers who received robots in the past 12 months were existing customers, and that installs can take as little as 8 hours. ¹¹¹²
Physicl (Paris) raised a $10M seed (early-stage funding) led by Inovia Capital and launched Studio, with 10,000 3D environments and 100,000 assets for generating synthetic robot-training data. World-model builder SpAItial is an early customer. ¹³
Aformic (Duncan, South Carolina) raised a $6.95M seed (early-stage funding) led by Veteran Ventures Capital for self-driving forklifts and carts. It says it has won more than $34M in orders, and plans robots for building and maintaining AI data centers. ¹⁴
SYNCERE (Palo Alto) announced an $11M pre-seed (funding for a startup's earliest work) to bring home robotics to the mass market. ¹⁵
China cools: Bloomberg reports Chinese robotics fundraising slowed to about 11 billion yuan ($1.6B) in October, a sharp drop from the pace after Unitree's Spring Festival showcase. ¹⁶

Why it matters: The largest round of the week went to the company that sells robot hours rather than robots, which is the same shift from buying equipment upfront to paying ongoing service costs that Agility pitches with robots-as-a-service. Tutor's teleoperators-first approach means it collects training data from paying customers from day one. Bloomberg's China figure, set against last week's Unitree R&D jump, suggests the capital that fueled Chinese humanoid makers is getting more selective.

5. Models and open source: AGIBOT's GO-3 Preview and Baidu's 280B open base model

AGIBOT GO-3 Preview (Nov 3): AGIBOT says its new embodied foundation model ranks first on the RoboDojo, RoboTwin and RoboColiseum benchmarks and will be fully open-sourced by the end of 2026. AGIBOT says its Genie Evolver system trains with a fleet of 100 physical robots plus simulation and world models, and that a Genie G2 improved on tasks in a real convenience store. ¹⁷
Baidu ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base (Nov 5): a mixture-of-experts model with 280B total and 14B active parameters, pre-trained on 33.5 trillion tokens and released without post-training. Weights are on Hugging Face in FP8 and BF16, and a post-trained version is expected. Baidu says it competes with DeepSeek V4 Flash and MiMo V2.5 base models on reasoning, code and long-context tests. ¹⁸
Xiaomi-Robotics-1: Xiaomi says its open-source robot model, pre-trained on 100,000 hours of real-world robot data, began trial runs in staff apartments and completed more than 50 task chains across three rooms in a 30-minute run. ⁸

Why it matters: Chinese labs are pushing open weights at both ends of the stack: a 280B base model for general work and an AGIBOT robot model promised for release. If GO-3 ships open by year-end, small robot teams get a free foundation model that was post-trained on a 100-robot fleet, which would lower the price of entry set by closed APIs such as Physical Intelligence's.

6. Hiring and the map: Tesla works on Optimus hands and covering, Figure staffs robot shifts

Tesla is hiring for the outside of Optimus. New Optimus design roles in Palo Alto and Langley, BC, include a Robotics Mechanical Design Engineer, Force Torque Sensing, a Soft Goods Engineer and a Robotics Textile Development Engineer, alongside gears and plastics roles. Force and torque sensing is new in Tesla's Optimus postings, which may indicate work on sensing in the hands and on a fabric outer covering for the robot. In Fremont, roles such as a night-shift test technician, a hand repair technician and a launch engineer may point to the Optimus line moving toward shift-based production.
Figure is staffing robot operations across shifts. It opened night and swing shift coordinator roles and a Service Manager, Robot Technicians in Santa Clara, plus a Swing Shift Coordinator in Fontana, CA, a location new to its postings. That could signal Figure is running and servicing robots around the clock, possibly at a customer site in Fontana.
Amazon's Fauna science hiring is shifting to New York. New applied scientist and senior applied scientist roles opened there while several Sunnyvale roles closed, the same week CNBC reported the Personal Robotics Group around Fauna's Sprout (section 3). In Bellevue, a new Advanced Manufacturing Engineer, Actuators posting hints at more in-house actuator work.
Apptronik is leaning toward hardware. New roles include a Mechanical Engineer, Actuation and a Senior Manager of Electrical Engineering, Compute & Sensing, while senior software roles in dexterous manipulation, controls and robot machine learning closed. That suggests a near-term focus on actuators and electronics.

7. What to watch next

SoftBank and ABB: whether the deal is restructured around the China ruling.
CoRL 2026 in Austin, Nov 9 to 12, where NVIDIA's Jim Fan has teased a GR00T keynote.
Samsung and Hyundai's Nov 9 meeting for any Atlas memory supply agreement.
Agility's first public-company reporting and whether AGLT holds after its debut.