Toyota's secret humanoid hits $1.1B

PLUS: Boston Dynamic's Spot wants to be a delivery bot

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Jennifer Mossalgue, Rowan Cheung, Shubham Sharma & Zach Mink
July 16, 2026

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Most humanoid startups launch with a demo reel and a dream. Walden Robotics — a six-month-old spinout from Toyota’s research lab — emerged from stealth with $300M in seed money, a $1.1B valuation, and a humanoid already pulling eight-hour shifts on a factory floor.

The twist: Walden thinks the future of humanoids may not need legs at all.

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Toyota’s humanoid spinoff lands $1.1B

  • Boston Dynamics tests Spot as a delivery bot

  • Hyundai workers strike over robot coworkers

  • Missile engineer builds mosquito-killing drones

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

WALDEN ROBOTICS

Image source: Walden Robotics

The Rundown: Walden Robotics — a humanoid startup spun out of Toyota’s research lab — emerged from stealth with ~$300M in seed funding and a $1.1B valuation, one of the largest seed raises ever disclosed by a robotics startup.

The details:

  • Toyota and Deviation Capital co-led the round, with Nvidia, Boeing, Samsung Ventures, and CoreWeave Ventures among the backers.

  • Walden’s robots roll on wheeled bases rather than legs — the upper half has arms and a sensor-studded head; the lower half is a wheeled or fixed platform.

  • One robot is already working eight-hour shifts at a Toyota plant, loading and unloading car parts, cleaning machinery, and kitting for assembly.

  • CEO Russ Tedrake, an MIT professor, built the company around Large Behavior Models, designed to let robots learn new tasks through real-world practice. 

Why it matters: Every serious humanoid player is chasing a factory to host its robots and real-world data to train them, which is why Figure courted BMW, Apptronik teamed with Mercedes, and Hyundai bought Boston Dynamics outright. Walden’s edge is that it was born inside Toyota, and factories and funding were there from day one.

BOSTON DYNAMICS

Image source: Boston Dynamics / YouTube

The Rundown: Boston Dynamics is testing its $75K Spot as a last-mile delivery assistant, strapping a conveyor belt to the robot dog’s back so it can ferry packages from van to doorstep while the driver preps the next drop.

The details:

  • In a demo, Spot hops out of a delivery van, gets loaded with parcels via a back-mounted conveyor, walks up steps, and slides the package at the doorstep.

  • Spot product manager Paige Miller says the robot can carry two 16x12x10-inch parcels, covering at least 60% of a typical van’s packages.

  • Boston says it’s in talks with major logistics firms and aims for a full pilot for Spot, working alongside a driver, to deliver 200 packages a day, 5 days/week.

  • The video closes with a wheeled Spot variant, and Boston Dynamics floats a future where autonomous vehicles haul entire fleets of delivery Spots.

Why it matters: Starship and Serve have already claimed the flat-sidewalk market with simpler wheeled bots, while delivery drones target lightweight packages; Spot’s edge is the terrain they cannot handle—stairs, curbs, gravel, and the last few feet to a front door. But at $75K and just two parcels per trip, it is an expensive solution.

AUTOMATION

Image source: Hyundai

The Rundown: Hyundai's plan to put 25K Atlas humanoids on its factory floors just collided with the humans already working there — South Korean workers staged a strike after wage talks collapsed, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The details:

  • Roughly 40K union members backed the action after 11 rounds of stalled wage talks; the partial three-day strike had workers leaving two hours early.

  • Atlas — built by Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics — is slated for repetitive tasks like parts kitting in U.S. plants starting in 2028.

  • Atlas will expand into component assembly by 2030; Hyundai is also planning a U.S. robotics facility capable of producing 30K robots annually by 2028.

  • The union’s line is absolute: no humanoid on the production floor without a labor-management agreement, plus income protections.

Why it matters: Tesla, BMW, Toyota, and BYD are all racing humanoids to the line, but Hyundai owns Boston Dynamics — and each Atlas costs less than two years of one worker’s wages. Three days of shortened shifts won’t stop the machines from coming, but it’s reportedly the first time an automaker’s robot ambitions have cost it production.

ROBOTICS FOR GOOD

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: French startup Tornyol, backed by Y Combinator, demoed its tiny autonomous drones designed to hunt mosquitoes by their wingbeat frequency, with the stated goal of eradicating the species from human habitats.

The details:

  • The drones use ultrasonic sonar to lock onto a mosquito’s unique wingbeat signature, then pull the target into one of four tiny propellers.

  • Each drone patrols up to five acres and flies three minutes per charge before returning to its station, per Tornyol’s specs.

  • CEO Alex Toussaint, a missile engineer, posted a clip of its first “air-to-air kill” — a drone chasing down a moth in an enclosure and reducing it to powder.

  • The company’s long-term plan is mapping the full mosquito breeding cycle — where they feed, hatch, and gather — to target populations at the source.

Why it matters: Malaria alone kills over 600K people a year, most of them young children — which makes this one of the rare “killer drone” pitches almost everyone can get behind. But the system has only shown one real-world intercept, and the target was a moth — a slower, far larger insect than the thing it’s built to hunt.

QUICK HITS

Amsterdam-based Monumental raised $32M to bring its fleet of autonomous bricklaying robots to the U.S. this year, targeting Texas, Florida, Virginia, and Arizona.

Beijing-based Booster Robotics launched the T2, a 1.4m, 42 kg humanoid with 31 degrees of freedom, a 10 kg two-arm payload, and an Nvidia Jetson Thor brain.

Waymo robotaxis stalled and died in San Francisco’s July 4 gridlock, reportedly exposing cities’ lack of tools to manage AV fleets during major events.

KAIST’s robot dog taught itself to switch gaits mid-run — trotting and bounding over stairs and logs from training data generated in eight minutes, according to researchers.

Impossible Metals is opening a Pittsburgh robotics hub to build autonomous underwater robots that safely pluck mineral-rich nodules from the seabed.

Zipline poached execs from Tesla, Waymo, and Uber to scale its U.S. drone delivery business, which its CEO expects to grow 15x this year.

Uber is lobbying D.C. to require robotaxis to operate on hybrid networks alongside human drivers, pitting it directly against Waymo, which backs the city’s AV bill.

Robbyant debuted LingBot-VA 2.0, a new video-action model that predicts how a scene will evolve and what actions a robot should take.

Coco Robotics is bringing its sidewalk delivery robots to Washington, D.C., this summer as the company scales toward thousands of robots by the end of 2026.

XPeng plans to scale monthly production of its IRON humanoid past 1K units by year-end, deploying it first as a shopping assistant in its China stores in 2027.

COMMUNITY

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