Amazon builds its home robot team

PLUS: Zipline nearly triples its valuation

AuthorAuthorAuthorAuthor

Jennifer Mossalgue, Rowan Cheung, Shubham Sharma & Zach Mink
November 09, 2026

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Amazon’s $1,450 Astro rolled into 2021 on wheels, never got past invite-only, and ended up in just a few thousand homes.

So the company bought a 3.5-ft. humanoid that walks, dances, and holds a conversation, and built a new robotics group around it. Can it crack the home bot market this time?

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Amazon takes another shot at the home robot

  • Zipline hits $21.5B on Walmart deal

  • Humble Robotics lands $51M for cabless trucks

  • Spider robot welds ships upside down

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AMAZON

Image source: Fauna Robotics / Reve

The Rundown: Amazon is rebuilding its home-robot effort around a new personal robotics team and Fauna Robotics — the startup behind the 3.5-ft. humanoid Sprout — five years after its wheeled Astro reached only a few thousand homes, CNBC reports.

The details:

  • Fauna is now part of Amazon’s Personal Robotics Group, which also includes staff from Lab126, the hardware lab behind Kindle and Echo.

  • Earlier this year, Amazon moved much of the Astro team, makers of its $1,450 wheeled robot, onto the project and brought in MIT roboticist Luca Carlone.

  • Fauna’s Sprout can walk, grip, dance, and hold conversations. It sells to research labs for $50K, and Disney was an early customer.

  • A spokesperson said Amazon bought Fauna because it is “committed to tackling the challenges that can unlock the personal robotics category.”

Why it matters: Astro launched in 2021 but remained invite-only and reached only a few thousand homes. Amazon’s other path into home robotics also collapsed when EU scrutiny killed its iRobot deal in Jan. 2024, leaving the company with a $94M breakup fee, making this new push another attempt to crack a market it has so far failed to own.

TOGETHER WITH INTEL

The Rundown: Research commissioned by Intel uncovers five pillars that determine how well orgs can deliver on the promise of robotics: strategy, skills, safety, shape, and scale.

Get the Robotics Readiness Report to discover:

  • The robotics opportunity

  • Where robotics ambitions are outpacing readiness

  • The 5 factors for robotics success

ZIPLINE

Image source: Zipline

The Rundown: Zipline just raised $1.5B at a $21.5B post-money valuation — nearly triple its January mark — and signed Walmart to a national deal for 300 new drone delivery sites.

The details:

  • Walmart will add 300 Zipline sites across the U.S. under a new multi-year deal, up from the 21 the two companies run today in Texas and Arkansas.

  • Uber, which partnered with Zipline in August, is targeting 1M drone deliveries a day with the company by 2029, according to Zipline.

  • The cash goes to U.S. manufacturing and hiring, and Zipline’s factory near SFO can already build as many as 20K aircraft a year, per Bloomberg.

  • Zipline first made its name flying blood and medical supplies in Africa; today its drones haul groceries, retail, and takeout orders weighing up to 8 lb. within a 10-mile radius.

Why it matters: Zipline made 1M+ deliveries in Dallas-Fort Worth this year and says its median Oct. orders arrived in 19 minutes, versus 30+ by traditional delivery. Rivals are also heating up: Amazon is taking drones to ~500 U.S. locations, Walmart also uses Wing, and regulatory approvals and noise-wary neighbors aim to slow things down.

HUMBLE ROBOTICS

Image source: Humble Robotics

The Rundown: Uber autonomy vet Eyal Cohen’s Humble Robotics raised $51M for purpose-built electric self-driving trucks with no cab, no steering wheel, and no seat for a human driver.

The details:

  • Obvious Ventures led the Series A, joined by existing investors Eclipse and Energy Impact Partners, taking the San Francisco startup’s total funding to $75M.

  • Its Humble Hauler is an electric platform designed to carry 40 ft. shipping containers, ditching the cab rather than bolting autonomous hardware onto a conventional semi.

  • Humble is focusing on regional freight runs under 250 miles, like ports, warehouses, distribution centers, and other repetitive routes.

  • Cohen told Business Insider customer pilots start in Q1 2027 and commercial operations in Q3 2027; Humble hasn’t moved any freight commercially yet.

Why it matters: Rivals Aurora and Kodiak are putting self-driving systems into conventional semis with cabs, while Humble and Einride are building trucks with no cab at all. Humble is targeting short regional trips, and routes under 250 miles carried 87% of U.S. truck freight by weight in 2021, per the DOE.

DIDEN ROBOTICS

Image source: Diden Robotics

The Rundown: South Korea’s Diden Robotics has built a four-legged robot that clings to steel walls and ceilings, hauls 66 lb. of welding gear into hard-to-reach ship compartments, and is already putting welds onto vessels in trials.

The details:

  • Electro-permanent magnets switch on or off with a short electrical pulse and, according to Diden, hold without continuous power.

  • Early robot dog prototypes flipped when they turned sideways on walls; spreading the legs kept the body closer to the steel and the feet flatter.

  • The robot localizes without GPS by comparing live 3D sensor scans against a ship’s CAD model, while depth cameras map nearby obstacles for navigation.

  • Diden says Spider is undergoing welding trials at Korea’s three major shipbuilders.

Why it matters: Diden plans to mass-produce the Spider in 2027 and put about 250 robots on industrial sites by 2028, after signing its first export contract with an unnamed European client in Oct. Four KAIST humanoid-lab researchers founded the company in 2024, and in June it was looking to raise about $65M at a valuation of near $324M.

QUICK HITS

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said the platform is emerging as a major open-source robotics AI hub, with robotics datasets nearing 100K, models at 30K, and LeRobot surpassing 1M downloads.

Beijing-based GenRobot AI raised $100M in Series A+ funding to expand its robot-training data infrastructure, which captures human-demo data for robotics developers.

Researchers in Japan developed 3D-printed humanoid robot legs that mimic bones, muscles, tendons, and ligaments to create more human-like movement.

Researchers showed that tampering with a robot’s camera feed sharply raises the odds its AI model will try something dangerous in the physical world, an exposure that grows as robots move into people’s homes.

Serve Robotics is selling the tech behind its sidewalk bots (cloud compute links, fleet data, etc.) to other robot makers, and Bedrock Robotics is already a customer.

China’s Pudu Robotics, which earns about 80% of its sales overseas, is expanding from service robots into humanoids to compete with Tesla and drive global growth.

MIT and NYU researchers built FLEX, a system that lets robots read the intent behind an instruction, so “don’t spill coffee on the laptop” becomes “keep liquids away from all electronics.”

AGIBOT tested six G2 humanoid robots in a 24-hour convenience-store challenge, where they stocked shelves, prepared food and coffee, and greeted customers.

A Caltech robot autonomously built part of a structure in orbit, paving the way for huge space telescopes, antennas, and solar-power stations assembled in space.

The Royal Navy launched its first autonomous squadron, putting uncrewed boats on frontline reconnaissance, escort, and potentially strike missions.

That's it for today!

Before you go we'd love to know what you thought of today's newsletter to help us improve The Rundown experience for you.

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

See you soon,

Rowan, Zach, Shubham, Jennifer, and Nate — The Rundown’s editorial team