23-05-2025
Function over flash: Specialised robots attract billions with efficient task handling
"We've found that by solving a very specific problem in a high-need area like healthcare, we can create a sustainable business model," Diligent Robotics CEO Andrea Thomaz said, adding Moxi has reached product-level profitability.
Humanoid challenges
The interest comes as general-purpose humanoids face challenges such as teaching machines to navigate unpredictable environments and developing sophisticated reasoning abilities.
Unlike generative AI, which is trained on vast online datasets of text, images and audio, the data available to develop humanoid robots is far more limited. These machines must learn by interacting with the physical world and training on datasets focused on tasks such as stacking boxes.
Firms like Figure AI, which aims to ship 100,000 humanoid robots over the next four years, rely on advanced AI to process real-time sensory data. That means such robots are mostly confined to controlled environments such as car factories.
The cost of humanoids is also far higher than task-specific robots. Components such as cameras and lidar sensors can push manufacturing costs for humanoid robots to between $50,000 (R895,542) and $200,000 (R3.6m) per unit, compared with $5,000 (R89,554) to $100,000 (R1.8m) for task-specific machines, according to industry executives and a market study by startup Standard Bots.
"[True] general-purpose robots have not really been invented yet," said Marc Theermann, strategy chief at Boston Dynamics, adding that "if somebody claims that they are commercially finding a general-purpose robot, they are over-promising and they will under-deliver."
While the company's Atlas robot has made headlines with viral clips of it leaping, flipping and dancing, Theermann said the value currently lies in targeted designs. Its four-legged robot, Spot, excels in hazardous industrial inspections, a narrow but lucrative niche.
Era Ventures has backed ViaBot, whose autonomous machines manage trash collection in parking lots. Parkway Venture Capital has diversified its bets between Siera AI's forklift automation and Figure AI's humanoid ambitions.
"You'll see a transition where there will be robots built for a task doing something very useful, very cost-effectively," said Raja Ghawi, Partner at Era Ventures. "And as that gets better, people will realise there is a good reason to have a full humanoid."
