The world is just not quite ready for humanoids yet

Famed roboticist and iRobot founder Rodney Brooks has sounded the alarm about an investment bubble in humanoid robots. He’s not alone.

In one recent essayBrooks mentions the billions of venture capital being poured into humanoid robot companies like Figure. His take: Despite the amount of money injected into the industry, humanoids will not be able to learn the dexterity – or the fine motor movements with the hands – rendering them essentially useless.

His stance could surprise some, especially the venture capital funds investing in the sector. But not the multiple robotics-focused VCs and AI scientists who have told TechCrunch in recent months that they don’t expect humanoid robots to be widely adopted in the next few years — if not more than a decade.

The problems

Fady Saad, general partner at robotics-focused VC Cybernetix Ventures and former co-founder of MassRobotics, told TechCrunch that beyond sending humanoids into space instead of human astronauts, he doesn’t see a huge market yet.

“People who have probably never seen humanoids, or haven’t closely followed what’s happening, are impressed by what’s happening now with humanoids, but we remain a bit conservative and skeptical about the actual use case and the actual revenue that will be generated,” Saad said.

Saad also worries about safety, especially when humans and humanoid robots share the same space. Safety concerns can arise from hominins and humans working closely together on a factory floor or other industrial locations. Saad says these concerns increase when humanoids invade people’s homes – a goal that many humanoid companies are working toward.

“If this thing falls on pets or children, it will hurt them,” Saad said. “This is just one aspect of a big hurdle that no one is paying attention to, or that very few people are paying attention to. The other thing is, how many people are comfortable with having a humanoid in their house? What if he gets hacked? What if he goes crazy at night and starts breaking things?”

The timeline for this technology is also not clear – a crucial factor for VCs that have a fund life cycle and timelines for returning capital to investors.

The timeline

Sanja Fidler, the vice president of AI research at Nvidia, told TechCrunch in August that while it’s difficult to pin humanoid development on an exact timeline, she compared the current surge of interest to the excitement in the early days of self-driving cars.

“I mean, look at self-driving cars, in 2017 and 2016, I mean, it felt tangible, right?” Fidler said at the time. “It took them quite a few more years to really scale up, and even now no one has really scaled up to whole world, full autonomy. It’s hard. It’s really hard to fully realize that technology.”

Nvidia chief scientist Bill Dally agreed in an interview with TechCrunch. Dally and Fidler’s comments are especially notable because Nvidia is also putting money into developing the infrastructure for humanoid companies to follow.

Seth Winterroth, a partner at Eclipse, said that while it can be easy to get excited about every new technological development or latest demo, humanoids are incredibly complicated. He added that it will take some time before they reach their full capabilities.

“It’s hard to release software for systems with six degrees of freedom; what we’re talking about with some of these humanoids are systems with more than 60 degrees of freedom,” Winterroth said of a robot’s ability to move on a 3D axis. “Then you have to have good unit economics around that solution so that you have strong gross margin so that you can build a sustainable business. I think we’re quite early.”

In most cases, humanoid robots are not yet ready for the world.

Tesla is a great example of the problems companies face. The company announced it was building its humanoid, Optimus, in 2021. The following year, Tesla said the bot would be introduced in 2023.

That didn’t happen. When the bot was introduced in 2024 at Tesla’s ‘We, Robot’ event, it was later revealed that the bots were largely controlled by humans off-scene. The company claims it will start selling the bots in 2026.

Robotics startup Figure, which was valued at $39 billion in a September fundraising, has done just that Skepticism has arisen about the number of hominids the company has actually deployed, a claim that the company resolutely defends.

What works

That doesn’t mean that humanoids won’t have a future market or that the technology isn’t worth working on.

Brooks himself said that he has no doubt that we will have humanoids in the future. But instead of what the market imagines when it hears humanoids, a robot with a human shape, he predicts that they will likely have wheels and other inhuman features and won’t hit the market for more than a decade.

There are startups working on the agility technology that Brooks is skeptical humanoids will be able to achieve, including Y Combinator-backed Conception and Loomiathat has built a kit that allows robotics companies to integrate touch into their machines.

There are also numerous humanoid companies that are starting to take orders and take interest in their robots. K Scale Labs received more than 100 pre-orders for its humanoid bot in the first five days, surprising even the founders, CEO Benjamin Bolte told TechCrunch.

Hugging Face has also seen strong demand from developers for its two humanoid bots. The company opened pre-orders for its smaller desktop version, the Reachy Mini, in July. The reaction was palpable. Just five days after opening orders for its Reachy Mini robots, Hugging Face had registered $1 million in sales.