Before launching Automated, we went back and forth a bit on whether the newsletter and podcast should have distinct branding. Given the relationship of the projects, however, it made a lot of sense to unite them under a single banner. Since their launch last September, they’ve proven to be complimentary, with podcast interviews often serving as the basis of newsletter features.
Our contributors have also become an increasingly important source of newsletter material. Below, for example, you’ll find Becca’s weekly fundraising roundup, plus an interview she did with the founders of space startup, Icarus Robotics. Liam, meanwhile, spoke to researchers at the University of Cambridge about how a robot is helping us understand how our ancestors’ first steps on land may have looked (not pretty, turns out).
Until today, getting all of those pieces in one place meant either navigating through various pages at automate.org or just waiting for this thing to drop in your inbox on Thursday morning. Today, however, I’m happy to offer you a sneak preview of something we’ve been working on for several months now.
Automated.fm is now a hub for all things Automated — the podcast, the newsletter, and now a devoted news page. It’s that last bit I’m especially excited about. You can check out the news hub over here. As you’ll no doubt notice there — and from clicking on some of the links below — the news stories themselves have gotten a refresh, making them much easier on the eyes.
We’re still very early stages, so you might see the occasional misaligned text, but I’m excited to show you what we’ve been working on.
As humans go, Jan Zizka’s SEO sucks. In Slovakian terms, it’s like going through life named George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, or Alexander the Great (the latter, admittedly, probably qualifies as more of a nickname).
“My grandfather and my father had the same name, so I would say it was kind of [an] obvious choice,” Brightpick’s CEO says with a laugh. He adds that sharing a name with a legendary Czech military leader has its perks in certain corners of the world. “It works in smaller central Europe. People always joke about it, so I would say it's somehow useful.”
The O.G. national hero Jan Zizka, who commanded the Taborite faction amid the Hussite Wars, doesn’t have quite the same gravity in the executive’s new home of Austin, Texas. For those conversations that command an icebreaker halfway around the world, however, there’s always the haircut. Business in the front, party in the back, as they say. Here, Zizek says, a direct line can be drawn to a longstanding interest in electronic music.
In the States, of course, the question of what music one listens to is significantly less consequential than what one does for a living. When the question is asked in Austin, you can certainly do worse than CEO of a robotics firm, as the Lone Star capital increasingly becomes a hot zone for physical AI and automation firms, including Apptronik, Fox Robotics, and Tesla.
Like Zizka, Brightpick’s roots can be traced back to Slovakia. The startup began life as a spinout of his earlier 3D imaging company, Photoneo. Much of the team went on to build the logistics automation firm in early 2021, as the pandemic shined a light on weaknesses in the global supply chain.
Formlabs is a perennial outlier. The MIT spinout launched amid the desktop 3D printing boom, delivering a stereolithography (SLA) system that vastly outperformed the FDM devices dominating the market. When the bubble burst a few years later, the Sommerville, Massachusetts startup was among the few that not only survived — but thrived.
More than a decade later, one can’t visit an R&D facility without encountering one of Formlabs’ orange-tinted systems. In 2017, the company lowered the bar of accessibility for another industrial method of manufacturing with the Fuse 1. Like SLA before it, selective laser sintering (SLS) was formerly the realm of massively cost-prohibitive systems, ranging from $500,000 to $1 million.
Today the company is announcing the Fuse X1, which takes a turn back to SLS’s industrial roots with a massive footprint. Keep in mind, of course, that in the world of 3D printing, bigger often does mean better, as it can equate to larger printing beds and therefore bigger prints. While the X1 matches some of those systems in terms of sheer size, the price point remains (relatively) accessible at $85,000.
If that number gives you pause, you’ve probably never been in the market for an industrial 3D printer. The price is representative of that not fully delineated space Formlabs has always occupied. After launching on Kickstarter, the company was initially viewed as a kind of high-end alternative to hobbyist/consumer companies like MakerBot. What’s helped it survive a near-industry collapse, however, is the ability to address several key elements of the production process.
“I think that where rapid prototyping ends and production begins is kind of a blurry line, and we see it more and more that customers are willing to go into production with 3D printing,” chief product officer, David Lakatos, told me last week.
Physical AI is moving quickly. But Andrew Barry says one of the biggest unlocks in robotics is not just getting robots to move through the world. It is getting them to touch, grasp, adjust, and manipulate the world with real dexterity.
Daniel Rausch (Amazon) - What does Alexa look like in the age of large language models? Amazon VP Daniel Rausch discusses how the smart assistant is continually evolving.
Daniela Rus (MIT CSAIL)- This episode has it all: physical AI, sperm whale alphabets, and some cutting edge insight into autonomy. It's also recorded in front of a live audience at MassRobotics. You're not going to want to miss it.
In an era of massive funding-raising rounds for physical AI, Generalist still manages to stand apart from the pack with some truly impressive demos. The Bay Area firm has showcased some truly dexterous learning, courtesy of its Gen-0 and Gen-1 models, which debuted in November 2025 and April 2026, respectively. The company just announced another raise — this one to the tune of $400 million — pushing its total funding north of half a billion dollars, and it’s boasting an equally impressive list of investors to boot, including NVIDIA, Boldstart Ventures, Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions, and NFDG. New angel investors include Bin Lin, Fei-Fei Li, and Naval Ravikant. “We are still early in the journey,” the company writes in a recent announcement. “The defining moments in AI have come when research breakthroughs and product inflections compound on each other. Only two months after GEN-1, we are beginning to see a flywheel take shape: scaling robot learning creates better models, better models can do more useful physical work, and data from real businesses drives the next generation of more capable models.”
Standard Bots Tuesday announced a $200 million raise, valuing the industrial automation firm at $1 billion. The Series C arrives amid a Congress push to address the role of domestic robotics in manufacturing and other industries. Standard CEO Evan Beard is among the executives who participated in a recent U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee. The firm says the money will go toward scaling and deploying Standard’s industrial systems, along with an expansion of its Glen Cove manufacturing facility in Long Island, New York. “AI-native robots are the essential power tool of the 21st century — the tool that will grow American manufacturing and help every worker to be a force at work,” Beard said in a release tied to the news. “AI will allow industrial robots to do 100x more tasks with full autonomy. You just show your robot how it’s done, and it learns through demonstration. The quickest way to get to full autonomy is through deployments, collecting real-world data, and iterating as fast as possible. Standard Bots is the furthest along in that regard with the most vertically integrated, onshore production process, and this new capital just accelerates all of that.”
Google DeepMind Tuesday unveiled its first-ever robotics accelerator cohort. Fifteen European robotics and physical AI startups will receive three months of mentorship and technical support from Google, including access to the company’s AI stack and robotics models. “These startups reflect the growing momentum of robotics and intelligent systems across Europe,” per DeepMind Robotics VP, Caroline Parada. “Each company will receive mentorship and strategic guidance from Google DeepMind and Google to help them accelerate development and scale responsibly.”
The International Space Station had a good run. It’s been doing its thing in low earth orbit for just shy of 30 years. The ISS’s 2030 retirement will leave a 990,000 pound hole in the center of the industry that an entire cottage industry is looking to fill. Icarus Robotics’ Joy system is designed to help relieve astronauts’ day-to-day menial tasks. “When you can do these pick-and-place operations with a robot, you can operate across a wide variety of task domains and have a great amount of economic impact, and free up astronauts to focus on the things that only they can do, because humans are extremely, extremely good at research,” CEO Ethan Barajas told A3.
For years, roboticists have looked to the snake for guidance in navigating tight squeezes like pipes and fuel lines. A team at the University of Michigan, on the other hand, has turned to the humble earthworm. After all, few things in the animal kingdom say flexible and multi-directional quite like it. Named SPPIRO (soft, power-autonomous, proprioceptive in-pipe), the system moves along the inside of pipes ranging from 140mm to 200 mm by folding and unfolding its soft, “origami” actuators. The robot operates untethered at up to 9.5 millimeters per second vertically and 6.5 millimeters per second horizontally, and is capable of making its way through the angles of a T-joint.
Call it one small step for a fish robot, and a potential breakthrough in understanding how our underwater ancestors made their way onto dry land. After creating computer models based on the gait of modern land traversing fish, researchers at the University of Cambridge discovered a somewhat universal style of flop-walking. Lungfish, snakefish, catfish, and a handful of other species can get where they’re going when they need to. It’s not always pretty, but it could point to how species managed the feat hundreds of millions of years back. Liam spoke to the researchers about the role robotics is playing in forming that understanding.
Not every robot needs to look like a human or do your chores. Yukai Engineering is taking a very different approach to consumer robotics. Instead of building humanoids or hyper-functional home robots, the Tokyo-based startup is creating simple, physical companion robots designed to make people smile, feel comforted, and emotionally connect.
The Association for Advancing Automation (A3) is North America’s largest automation trade association representing more than 1,400 organizations involved in robotics, artificial intelligence, machine vision & imaging, motion control & motors, and related automation technologies.
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