Uber’s $10B answer to Waymo

PLUS: U.S. startups stuff Chinese robots in luggage

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Jennifer Mossalgue, Rowan Cheung, Shubham Sharma & Zach Mink
August 10, 2026

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Uber built its empire by owning the rider, not the car. Now it’s putting $10B behind 120K robotaxis to make sure that formula survives the driverless era.

The bet: let Waymo, Wayve, Nuro, and others build the brains, while Uber owns the network that decides what shows up at your curb. But as Waymo starts flexing its own consumer ambitions, Uber is about to find out whether it can keep owning the rider.

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Uber’s $10B push for 120K robotaxis

  • Startups haul robot parts from China in luggage

  • Robot makers are betting big on laundry

  • Wonder rebuilds restaurants around robots, drones

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

UBER

Image source: Uber

The Rundown: Uber is committing more than $10B to put 120K driverless cars on its app, none of them its own, the Financial Times reports. What Uber brings is the rest: dispatch, charging, depots, insurance, and 200M people who already have the app.

The details:

  • CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said Uber will commit more than $10B toward deploying up to 120K autonomous vehicles through deals with AV partners.

  • The company is aiming to have robotaxi operations in at least 15 cities by year-end, up from seven today, though it has not publicly identified the full roster.

  • Rather than revive the self-driving unit it sold in 2020, Uber wants to be an aggregator for companies like Waymo, Wayve, Zoox, Nuro, Waabi, and WeRide.

  • Waymo is Uber’s biggest AV partner and its clearest threat: Austin and Atlanta exclusivity ends by early 2028, and the Phoenix pilot is already dead.

Why it matters: Uber is betting autonomy can replace the driver, but not the customer relationship: it keeps the riders while AV developers plug into its marketplace. The catch is that Uber is now putting billions behind the fleets, trading its asset-light model for capital costs, regulatory delays, and still-unproven robotaxi economics.

U.S.-CHINA

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: U.S. humanoid startups are so hungry for Chinese hardware that engineers are flying to Shenzhen and packing robot parts into their luggage for the trip home, The Information reports.

The details:

  • The reported shopping runs center on Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei electronics market, where buyers can source humanoids and specialized components.

  • Hand-carrying high-value parts such as actuators can shave freight lead times and keep small teams moving through prototype cycles faster.

  • The timing is awkward: the FCC barred imports of new Chinese humanoid and quadruped robot models last month.

  • It highlights the gap between Washington’s push to curb Chinese tech dependence and China’s entrenched role in robotics supply chains.

Why it matters: Washington can ban Chinese robots faster than U.S. companies can replace the Chinese supply chain inside them. The suitcase run shows how deeply America’s humanoid boom still depends on Shenzhen, even as policy pushes the industry to decouple.

HUMANOIDS

Image source: Weave Robotics

The Rundown: Silicon Valley’s hottest home-robot startups are making laundry folding their proving ground, betting that mastering the chaotic physics of laundry can unlock broader domestic automation, Business Insider reports.

The details:

  • Figure AI, Sunday Robotics, and Weave Robotics have all put folding clothes on public display. LG brought CLOiD to CES to do the same.

  • The hurdle is the manipulation of deformable objects: clothes wrinkle and vary in texture and shape, demanding reliable perception, grasping, and planning.

  • Training pipelines run on humans, with companies capturing first-person videos of people doing chores and using teleoperators for robot action.

  • Weave’s wheeled Isaac 1 is designed to process a load in 30–90 minutes and ships in a limited form; Sunday says it plans a home beta for Memo this fall.

Why it matters: Laundry makes a tough benchmark for physical AI: a robot that handles an unfamiliar shirt in an unfamiliar room is showing skills that could carry over to cleaning, cooking, and eldercare. What the demos obscure is how much scaffolding holds them up — curated data, controlled setups, and even a human on a remote link.

WONDER

Image source: SweetGreen

The Rundown: Grubhub owner Wonder is betting that restaurants can start behaving more like software, with AI spinning up new food brands — robots cranking more meals through the kitchen, and drones taking on the last mile.

The details:

  • Marc Lore’s food-delivery company is layering AI, robotics, and autonomous delivery onto its increasingly vertically integrated food business.

  • Wonder and Zipline plan to launch drone delivery from select Texas locations in January 2027, starting in Dallas and expanding across the state.

  • In November, Wonder expects to launch an AI menu-creation tool that can turn a prompt into an entire restaurant concept, including its menu and branding.

  • Wonder has also bought Spyce, the business behind Sweetgreen’s Infinite Kitchen technology, for $186.4M; the deal closed last December.

Why it matters: Wonder is testing whether the AI-era “full stack” play can work in the notoriously low-margin, physically messy restaurant business, not just in software. If it does, food brands could start looking less like restaurants and more like software, cheaply spun up on top of a shared network for production and delivery.

QUICK HITS

Chinese humanoid makers reportedly nabbed 97% of global shipments in the first half of 2026, as worldwide deliveries more than tripled YoY to about 19,100 units.

Moove, the Dubai-headquartered fleet operator that already runs Waymo's robotaxis in Phoenix, Miami, and Las Vegas, raised $250M at a $2.1B valuation.

Cambridge Aerospace, a UK missile- and drone-interceptor developer, raised $300M in funding at a $3.4B valuation to advance its defense systems.

California’s Teamsters are suing to block the state's autonomous-truck rules, arguing regulators skipped economic analysis and put up to 400K trucking jobs at risk.

Nucleus exited stealth, claiming it put human-piloted Unitree G1 humanoids in a German factory in under 90 days, selling the work by the hour instead of the robots.

MegCell Pulse, a 3D-printable robot on Kickstarter, straps onto any acoustic guitar and plays digital tabs with a mechanical fretting and picking arm.

The FCC is proposing to retroactively pull already-approved drones with LiDAR, thermal imaging, or aerosol dispensing, including DJI models, from the U.S. market.

Unitree’s founder Wang Xingxing became China’s first humanoid billionaire, worth an estimated $2.4B, after the company priced an IPO valuing it at about $9B.

COMMUNITY

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