The Austin-based company announced its Series A-X funding round Wednesday (Feb. 11), with investors including Google and AT&T. The round brings the company’s total Series A funding to more than $935 million.
“The investment will accelerate time to market and enable Apptronik to invest in projects that are needed to solve the use cases of its large number of retail, manufacturing, and logistics customers, including building state-of-the-art facilities for robot training and data collection,” the startup said in its announcement. “The funding will also fuel continued innovation in the company’s pioneering human-centered robot design, paving the way for its highly anticipated new robot set to debut in 2026.”
A report on the round by CNBC values the company at $5 billion and says Apptronik’s Apollo robots could potentially beat Chinese rivals and Tesla’s Optimus to the market.
Howard Morgan, whose B Capital led the round, told the network that he expects orders for $1 billion worth of these robots beginning next year, with Apptronik delivering the Apollo for around $80,000 a year.
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“Think about a factory worker doing three or four shifts, and on any weekend,” Morgan said. “Eighty-thousand is cheap!”
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Meanwhile, recent PYMNTS Intelligence research finds that those factory workers may be slightly less worried about the advent of robot employees than their white collar counterparts.
That research gauged the sentiment of two groups of workers. The first is those in the “Labor Economy,” which depends on “labor-intensive, task-based or contingent work” such as gig work, freelancing, contracting and hourly wage roles.
The second are those in the “Non-Labor Economy” who are more likely to be salaried employees in “stable roles with predictable pay, longer-term employment contracts and clearer career paths,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this week.
According to the research from PYMNTS Intelligence’s Wage to Wallet Index, 65.3% of Labor Economy workers reported that they feel confident their skills would remain valuable as technology evolves, compared with 73.7% of non-Labor Economy workers. The gap is a reflection of heightened exposure and uncertainty, not an anticipation of impending replacement.
“The data paints a picture of caution rather than panic,” PYMNTS added. “About 32.1% of Labor Economy workers say they worry that new technologies may reduce the need for people in their position or lower demand for their skills, closely tracking the 31.8% reported by non-Labor Economy workers.”
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