The Next AI Gold Rush? Inside the Race to Build Humanoid Robots

From billions of dollars pouring into robotics startups to the race to build humanoid machines, physical AI is emerging as a major investment frontier. But what will it take to turn that momentum into real-world breakthroughs? Today, we are lucky enough to be joined by Andrew Kang, CEO of RoboStrategy, to find out. Thank you so much for being here, Andrew. Hey, Justine. Thanks for having me. Yeah, of course. So let's start with RoboStrategy. So you co-founded the fund in 2025 to give investors exposure to private robotics companies. So why did you see this as the right time to launch? And talk to us a little bit about the opportunities you think that the market is really missing right now. Yeah, Justine. So just to give everyone a little bit more context, RoboStrategy is one of the first publicly traded venture capital funds listed on NASDAQ. And we believe that the AI revolution that has happened over the course of the next few years is kind of a predecessor to what's going to be happening to robotics. AI has transformed the world. It's transformed knowledge work. and robots are essentially the equivalent of of all of that for the physical world and um you know it was always something that we've dreamed of in sci-fi that we've seen in movies across the world and the barrier was always the intelligence for the robots and now we're getting the point that that intelligence is starting to be unlocked and we can have robots understand the world and act in the world, just like humans do. And I think it's going to really transform the labor market as we know it. Yeah, I mean, it definitely will. Thinking about, you know, that idea of the sci-fi in the future, one day kind of idea that everyone's had about robots to the fact of, oh, this is actually happening now. And AI and all of those other technologies are really making that possible. So definitely the perfect time to really be thinking about this. And there's just been so much momentum in robotics investment, including Figure Robotics raising $100 million dollars in the Series A round in September. I mean, what do you really think is driving this surge in capital? And are we seeing a turning point for the industry at this point? Yeah, I think investors are starting to understand that robotics is going to be a massive industry. Previously, we've had industrial arms, but globally, we've only had hundreds of thousands of robots that were being deployed on an annual basis. And with the intelligence bottleneck that we talked about earlier that being unblocked is what is going to allow us to have millions potentially as Elon has mentioned billions of robots including humanoids um you know in in the world over the course of the next decade so i think people are starting to understand that dream that the whole labor economy you know trillions tens of trillions of dollars is going to be unlocked by robotics and that's why they're starting to put capital in and it might seem like there's a good amount of capital going in, but if you actually compare it to the amount of money that's gone into AI, it is minuscule. We've had funding and robotics go up something around 4x year over year, but you still compare it to AI in 2021 before ChatGPT, and we're not even at those levels yet. So in my opinion, we're just getting started. Yeah, it seems like we really are as people start to kind of think, okay, this could really be a reality. How do I get in on this? thinking about all of these different robotics companies that exist now, right? We're seeing so many pop up saying that they can do all sorts of different things, build all sorts of different robots for the home, for other applications. I mean, there's just so many out there. And as we're talking about, there's really just going to be so many more down the line. So in thinking about where to actually invest, I mean, you've invested in Figure AI, Aptronics, what separates the robotics companies that you believe have the greatest long-term potential from the rest of the field at this point? Yeah, it's a good question. So robotics is an incredibly hard industry. You need competencies from hardware engineering, electrical engineering, robot learning, robot behaviors. And so that's kind of one of the first things we look for is, has the team and have the founder been able to pull together some of the best talent from all these different disciplines across the world? And after that, the second thing that we look for is, do they have a viable path to commercial development, or do they already have some traction in commercial development already? We have companies like Standard Bots in our portfolio, where they're now being sold to hundreds of customers. It's around almost every state in the US. They're on track for 10% of all US industrial robot deployments by end of 2027. We have Dyna Robotics in our portfolio being deployed but into data centers, into restaurants, into hotels. And so there's this wave that's starting to begin of companies that are crossing that chasm from pilots into real commercial deployment. And those are the companies that we're betting on. Yeah, it's a lot of different people to bring together, as you're saying, all those different skill sets and then making them all actually work together. Also thinking about physical AI, I mean, as this kind of next big frontier for artificial intelligence, what do you think are the biggest technical bottlenecks preventing robots from operating reliably in the real world? We talked about millions or even billions of robots getting out here in the next, you know, decades or so. How close are we to really being able to do that when it comes to this technical side of things? Yeah, so I think intelligence is going to be one of the most difficult parts of really scaling robotics to the billions, to have robots to be able to answer, you know, any question in the same way that that ChatGPT can. The thing is, we have really great robots today using AI, and they're able to be deployed because they have been trained in a form of specialized intelligence. So if you think about Waymo, for example, that's a form of physical AI. And they've trained the models behind Waymo to be really good at driving, but it's not good at anything but driving. And so we've had avenues of that same type of development happen for things like welding, for machine tending, for laundry folding. And now the next phase of it is scaling up data, it's scaling up compute, and it's making these models more generalizable so that they can do a lot of different tasks in the world. And so that's, I think, going to be happening over the course of the next three to five years, and it's going to require a lot of capital investment, but we are on that path to get there. Yeah, it seems like that investment is really going to have to be very big and very focused to get those jobs done and get the robots where they would need to be to really be deployed like that. I mean, thinking about where they will end up being, again, in commercial settings at home, what do you think this is going to do to work and to the workforce? Obviously, there's a lot of fear. Is a robot going to take my job? There's also a lot of talk of, well, jobs will just change. Where do you think this is really going to go? And what industries do you think would feel the impact the most? Well, I think the industries that are going to feel the impact the most are the ones that cannot find enough people to do the jobs. And that's fields like welding, for example. In 2030, we're going to have a global shortage of hundreds of thousands of welders. And if you look at some of the industries today, like shipbuilding or data centers or defense, they want to build a lot of things. And the reason why they have multiple year wait times and they can't produce as much as they want is because of that bottleneck in labor and and so companies like Path Robotics that are going after those labor bottlenecks first are going to be the ones that are adopted first and over time we're going to expand to other tasks as well but typically these are the tasks that are menial or monotonous people really don't want to do them and and so i think we'll see an upskilling in labor just as we have with technological advancements in the past. And then eventually, right, you know, we'll have humans hopefully have more free time as well to pursue other passions in their life. Yeah, a lot of different changes coming our way. We look at this globally, the US and China are both racing to dominate AI and robotics. So where do you think each country really has the advantage today? And also, what do you think this will do for competition as we move into the future with industry? Yeah, so it's a great question. I think China and the U.S., they're both going to have very strong independent robotics industries. We've seen this happen with EVs. We've seen this happen with drones. The U.S. has taken a stance that they want to reindustrialize America and that they want to have their own domestic robotics industry. You've seen recently that the FCC issued this ban against all advanced foreign robotics. And there's a few bills going through Congress right now to basically cement that. And so we think that type of protectionism will continue, but we think it's good for the industry. We think it's good for the nation. And we think it's going to allow America to develop a very fruitful robotics industry where you not just have humanoids, but you have industrial arms, you have a native supply chain, and China will have their own as well. And from an investment point of view, we think as with all the biggest companies in the world uh america will produce the biggest robotics companies as well yeah we definitely need to watch and see what happens there speaking of some of the biggest companies tesla is also a major player in the robotics space with its humanoid Optimus project with tesla's earnings coming up this week what were you really going to be watching for and what do you think that the company might reveal about the commercial future of robotics when we look at Tesla obviously as it is now and where it actually is going yeah so there's been a lot of rumors going around uh about how they're scaling up production when they're going to release Optimus and so i think that's what the market's watching for are they going to have more concrete plans uh there's always been some back and forth around uh when the release is actually going to be because a lot of the technology behind Optimus is quite complicated they have they have to get it right you know they want to release the robot and it's around humans it's around kids uh it could if it's not say if it could potentially hurt people, they got to make sure that they have everything 100% airtight before going onto the market. And so we'll be excited to see what kind of timelines they announce. Yeah, we definitely look forward to learning all about that. Lastly, before I let you go, RoboStrategy is a closed-end venture fund that gives public market investors access to private robotics companies, right? So talk to us just briefly about the benefits and risks of this approach and also how investors should really be thinking about valuing companies that are still developing their technology. Yeah, so a lot of the reason why we launched RoboStrategy was because we saw all of this growth happening in the private capital markets. Companies like Anthropic, SpaceX, OpenAI, going from billions to now in the trillions in a very short manner of time. We think that same growth is going to happen for robotics as well. And that trend of the privatization of venture capital is only going to continue as more capital flows in from corporate funds, from sovereign wealth funds, et cetera. And for the first time, retail, public market investors, they're able to access that exposure without needing to know, being on the inside with a small group of venture capitalists. And so in terms of the risk that we face, we obviously think this is going to be a massive, massive industry. The timelines for development can be a little bit uncertain, but I don't think it's going to be a 50-year thing, right? We have the acceleration of robotics research, just as we had acceleration of AI research. And those timelines have been compressed from decades to what we believe are going to be years before these models get really good. It's just a question of, is it going to be one year or is it going to be three years? Well, we definitely have a lot to think about and we appreciate you breaking this all down for us. Andrew Kang, CEO of RoboStrategy. Thank you so much for being here today. Thanks for having me, Justine.