Find 10 independent companies (≤500 employees; Tesla and Figure excluded) that build robots or robotics foundation models for grasping or manipulation, confirmed on an official product, research or demo page, and that announced a Series A or later round — or a seed extension of at least $10M — in the last 45 days, dated by the original announcement. Annotation vendors, academic labs, simulation-only firms, component suppliers, drones, autonomous driving and navigation-only robots are out of scope.
The search produced 7 companies — not 10 — with all three evidence types linked: a funding announcement dated 2026-08-25 to 2026-10-08 (inside the 45-day window ending 2026-10-09), an official manipulation proof page, and a public headcount estimate. Precision was prioritized over padding: no additional company cleared every criterion. Amounts are kept in original currencies, with no FX conversion.
| Company | Round | Amount (original currency) | Announced | Headcount estimate | Funding | Proof | Headcount |
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Method: 7 companies, one row each, matching all three criteria of a 10-company screen (manipulation proof on an official page, Series A+ or $10M+ seed-extension round announced 2026-08-25 to 2026-10-08 within the 45-day window ending 2026-10-09, independent with credible headcount upper bound ≤500). Dates are original announcement dates as identified by the research; some funding links are wire or reporting pages carrying the announcement rather than the issuer's own page. Amounts stay in stated currencies; no FX conversion. Source-mention counts show breadth of coverage, not independent confirmation. Headcount estimates disagree across sources: Locus Robotics shows 201–500 and 545, and ABLE Labs' link relies on entity-name matching that can admit similarly named firms. Long employee-estimate lists are condensed to a representative range for space.