Original titleFormic Raises $50 Million to Scale Physical AI Across U.S. Manufacturing - Industrial Equipment News
Formic raised $50 million to expand physical AI deployment across U.S. manufacturing operations.
Formic Raises $50 Million to Scale Physical AI Across U.S. Manufacturing Industrial Equipment News
Foundry Robotics announced an oversubscribed $100 million Series A funding round led by Marlinspike Partners. The round includes participation from early backers Khosla Ventures and Red Glass Ventures, alongside new investors SE Ventures, Wing VC, and Axiom Ventures.
Meta and Chinese robotics startup Fourier jointly developed humanoid robot prototype Max, a 48-kilogram robot completed in three months. The companies are working on a successor model, targeting the household robotics market for housekeeping and daily tasks.
The authors propose NEO-VLA, an encoder-free vision-language-action framework where images are tokenized and evolve jointly with language throughout the backbone. They show that this approach outperforms encoder-based counterparts across diverse manipulation tasks and distribution shifts.
PDRVLA, a vision-language-action model with a lightweight physical dynamics module, generates robot actions from visual input and language instructions. It learns from public data augmented with human-to-robot synthesis and embodied chain-of-thought annotation, achieving 99.3% success on LIBERO and up to 93.6% on RoboTwin 2.0.