Humanoid robots in 2026: public before they went to work.
As of November 8, 2026, two makers of humanoid robots are publicly traded companies, a third is valued at $39 billion, and the only independent account of a humanoid working in a factory says two or three robots, one at a time. This Comuvia News analysis reads the filings, the hearing record, the industry statistics and the makers' own channels, and asks what these machines have actually done for pay. Not investment advice.
The finding, in three parts. Capital and policy moved first. The deployment evidence is still pilot-scale. The robots that already work are somewhere else.
Capital and policy moved first. Unitree listed on Shanghai's STAR Market on August 19, 2026 and reported its first quarter as a public company on October 28: revenue 665 million yuan, up 69.9 percent; net profit 112.7 million yuan, down 17.4 percent; research spending up 250 percent to 19.1 percent of revenue; inventory of 1.02 billion yuan against 367 million at the end of 2025, which the company did not explain. Agility Robotics completed its business combination with Churchill Capital Corp XI on November 4 and began trading on Nasdaq as AGLT on November 5. The deal was struck at a "$2.5 billion pre-money equity value" with "more than $620 million of expected gross transaction proceeds" - $420 million of trust cash if no shareholders redeemed plus a roughly $200 million placement led by Foxconn. The company's 2025 net sales were $1.78 million, up from $310,000, against an operating loss of $140.2 million; more than half of that revenue came from five robots bought by one of its investors. It cites "more than $300 million of multi-year contracted Digit v5 orders", from one customer, "subject to the realization of certain contractual milestones". Figure's $39 billion valuation dates from its $1 billion Series C in September 2025; it discloses no revenue. In the same autumn, the President accepted a Section 232 finding that imports of robotics and industrial machinery threaten national security (October 28) and ordered Commerce and USTR to negotiate agreements rather than imposing a tariff; the House passed a defence bill (July 22) with a provision requiring the Pentagon to begin deciding whether Chinese robots should be banned nationwide, drawn from the GUARD Act introduced on June 3; ABB said on November 5 that China's foreign-investment security office "has prohibited the acquisition of the ABB Robotics business in China" by SoftBank, a $5.375 billion deal that had cleared competition review in February; and Hyundai Motor's union voted over 86 percent for strike action on June 24 with AI job protections as a demand in the wage talks.
The deployment evidence is pilot-scale. On Tesla's third-quarter call (October 21), Elon Musk described "early production on a high-volume line in Fremont" and said it would take "probably at least a year, maybe a little longer, to get to ... 20,000 units a week", which is also when deliveries to companies outside Tesla are to be expected; "there are still parts of the design that are changing ... it's mostly the hand". No count of robots built was given, and Tesla's own channel has published no Optimus footage since October 18, 2024. Figure says it has delivered more than 350 Figure 03 robots and names BMW and Catalyst Brands as customers. BMW told Forbes, in a report published on October 5, that the 2026 project at Spartanburg "was a non-production test with two or three robots", that only one robot worked at any given time, and that of the four robots in Figure's own video, one did the job. Figure's chief executive estimated "six or eight" robots on site and said he was "pretty sure" BMW was paying, adding that he wanted to check both points. Boston Dynamics began production of the new Atlas in January and said "All Atlas deployments are already fully committed for 2026" - to Hyundai's training centre in Georgia and to Google DeepMind - with other customers in early 2027 and the Georgia factory floor in 2028; Hyundai's investor materials speak of more than 25,000 Atlas robots and a factory able to build 30,000 a year. 1X sells its NEO home robot at $20,000 or $499 a month and states on its order page that for tasks the robot has not learned, "an Expert from 1X can remotely supervise its actions at scheduled times".
The robots that already work are elsewhere. The International Federation of Robotics counted 603,000 industrial robots installed in 2025, up 11 percent, and a record five million in operation; China installed 354,000, 59 percent of the world, and the United States passed Japan into second place at 38,500. The IFR's own summary says humanoids are "not yet industry-grade" and that conventional industrial robots are "economically superior" for production tasks today. Counterpoint counted more than 22,000 humanoids shipped worldwide in the first half of 2026, nearly 300 percent more than a year earlier, with AgiBot (about 9,700) and Unitree (more than 7,000) leading and the top five vendors, all Chinese, taking 86 percent; the applications are led by entertainment and research, not factory work. Amazon runs more than one million warehouse robots across more than 300 facilities, assisting with 75 percent of orders; the New York Times reported internal projections of 160,000 US hires avoided by 2027 and about 600,000 by 2033, which Amazon says reflect one team's view. Waymo reported 500,000 paid rides a week in March and, on October 28, "more than 300 million fully autonomous miles" in "15 major U.S. cities"; Tesla's service runs in six. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported October payrolls up 165,000 with manufacturing up 19,000 and "increased by 101,000 since a recent low in December 2025", and a third-quarter labor share of 53.0 percent, "the lowest level in the series, which begins in the first quarter of 1947". Both things are true at once; on this evidence the second is not attributable to robots.
The argument underneath. The builders' bet is that a robot can learn to use its hands from human video and demonstrations. Rodney Brooks, who co-founded iRobot and Rethink Robotics, wrote in September 2025 that "collecting just visual data is not collecting the right data", that a human hand has "about 17,000 low-threshold mechanoreceptors", that a robot twice the size releases about eight times the energy when it falls, and that "we are more than ten years away from the first profitable deployment of humanoid robots"; he restated the argument in February and October 2026. Ken Goldberg at Berkeley frames the same gap in time: the text that trained language models would take a person about 100,000 years to read, and robotics has about one year of comparable physical data. The makers' own concessions point the same way: Tesla on the hand, 1X on remote experts, the IFR on prototypes and pilot-stage systems.
Seven positions on one question - when do humanoids pay, and in what shape? From one end: Musk and Tesla (20,000 a week within a year or so); Goldman Sachs (6.5 million units a year by 2035); Hyundai and Boston Dynamics (30,000 a year by 2028, this year's output in a training centre); the sellers, Agility, Figure and Unitree (selling now, in small, gated or disputed volumes); the IFR (the ordinary robot arm is the better buy today); Goldberg (a data gap closed by engineering); Brooks (wrong data, a decade or more, and a different shape). The shared premise is that everyone on the line expects far more robots; the disagreement is about which shape, whose data, and when it pays.
Comuvia's complexity judgement, labelled as a judgement: high. Deployment evidence against valuation 5 of 5; feasibility of dexterity 4; China exposure 4; labor effects 3; policy trajectory 3. Three things would lower it: an audited unit count and revenue line from any humanoid maker; an independent account of a production deployment running unattended for months; and a dexterity benchmark with force and touch data published by a maker.
What to watch. SoftBank's results on November 10, for whether the ABB deal survives without China. Agility's first quarterly report as a public company. Tesla's promised Optimus video of tasks that are "not pre-programmed", due one to two months from October 21. 1X's first verified customer deliveries. The BLS November jobs report (December 4) and the revised third-quarter labor share (December 8). In 2027: Boston Dynamics' first outside customers; Unitree's full-year report and what the inventory became; the Section 232 report-back on the negotiations, about late April; any NDAA conference text on the Pentagon's robot review; and the start Tesla has named for Optimus deliveries to outside companies, at the end of the year.
On the record (seven fragments in the cut, original audio, official channels only): Tesla's most recent Optimus footage, 'Optimus Navigating Around' (company channel, October 18, 2024; music only, with the company's own captions and speed badges); Figure's 'F.03 at BMW' (company channel, June 30, 2026; music only); Boston Dynamics' 'How We Build Atlas' (company channel, October 14, 2026): "we say we're building prototypes and you see essentially almost a full manufacturing line ... a year ago, building one robot was quite an event ... now to build one robot, it's about a day"; Bloomberg Technology's interview with Agility Robotics' chief executive on the day of the Nasdaq debut (November 5, 2026): asked why not stay private while "deployments are still limited", she cited 30 customers in the pipeline, "300 million in pending orders" and a factory for 10,000 units a year; Unitree's autonomous-combat demonstration (company channel, September 7, 2026; music only, shown as the company's claim, with its closing card that "the humanoid robot field is in the early stages of exploration worldwide"); the House Homeland Security subcommittee hearing 'DeepSeek and Unitree Robotics' (official channel, public domain, March 17, 2026), in the words of Scale AI's Max Fenkell: "two different races ... the United States may be winning the wrong one"; and Rodney Brooks on the Association for Advancing Automation's podcast (association channel, October 28, 2026): developers collected hand-trajectory data and ignored force, and "it's not just let's collect a lot of video of people doing stuff". The spoken passages are quoted from local machine transcripts of the cuts, not from publisher captions.
Sources: Tesla Q3 2026 shareholder letter and call (October 21, 2026); Agility Robotics / Churchill Capital Corp XI Form 425 (June 24, 2026), S-4/A (September 30, 2026) and 8-K (November 4, 2026), with the S-4 figures as read by GeekWire, The Robot Report and Business Insider; Caixin on Unitree's Q3 (October 29, 2026); Forbes on Figure and BMW (October 5, 2026); Boston Dynamics (January 5, 2026); Korea Times (June 25, 2026); 1X order page (as read November 8, 2026); IFR World Robotics 2026 (September 24, 2026); Counterpoint Research (August 20, 2026); White House fact sheet and Proclamation FR 2026-22385 (October 28, 2026); House Select Committee on the CCP (June 3 and July 22, 2026); House Homeland Security Committee (March 15 and 17, 2026); ABB (November 5, 2026); BLS Employment Situation (November 6, 2026) and Productivity and Costs (November 5, 2026); Alphabet Q3 2026 CEO remarks (October 28, 2026); Rodney Brooks (September 26, 2025); Ken Goldberg, Science Robotics (August 27, 2025). Every figure above except two is located in a retained copy of its source, and the record page lists each one with its publisher, its capture date and the digest of the bytes quoted. The two exceptions are Forbes' report of BMW's statement and ABB's statement of November 5, which refused automated retrieval and are carried from their published text; the record page marks them so. The seven recordings are in the same packet: the four spoken passages as machine transcripts of the retained cuts, the three music-only films as the publisher's identity record for the video.
This is research and analysis, not investment advice. No position is recommended and nothing here is a forecast of any share price.
Comuvia News. Evidence from the record.