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Hello Robot co-founder Aaron Edsinger will showcase Stretch 4, the company's wheeled home-assistance robot, in a live demonstration at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Launched in May with its first production batch already sold out, Stretch 4 uses a single telescoping arm and wheels rather than legs or humanoid form to help people with severe mobility impairments perform everyday tasks like eating or closing blinds.
TechCrunch is offering early registration discounts of up to $200 off passes for its Disrupt 2026 conference, plus 50% off a second ticket, with the deal expiring September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT. The event runs October 13-15 at Moscone West in San Francisco and will feature over 10,000 attendees, 200+ sessions, and 250+ tech leaders across six stages.
UP.Labs has rebranded as Vantora after raising $100 million from Silversmith Capital Partners, shifting its model from building startups for the broader market to creating proprietary ventures exclusively for corporate partners. The firm still works with clients like Alaska Airlines and Porsche, and is now expanding into industrial manufacturing and oil and gas, with a heavier focus on physical AI applications such as retrofitting factory hardware for autonomy.
Bain Capital Ventures has closed a new $1.6 billion fund, up 14% from its prior $1.4 billion vehicle raised three years ago. The firm plans to deploy the capital mainly into AI-focused startups, targeting infrastructure, healthcare, physical AI, and security as key sectors it believes will define what it calls the 'post-AGI era'.
A VicOne-sponsored analysis highlights how physical AI systems—robots that use multimodal sensors and AI models to perceive and act—can be manipulated through corrupted training data, tampered infrastructure, or spoofed real-time sensor input, without any visible malfunction. It cites BadVLA, a NeurIPS 2025 study showing how a hidden trigger embedded in a Vision-Language-Action model can cause a robot to behave normally until the trigger appears, then subtly alter its physical movements.
Italian startup Exein raised $270 million led by Headline, valuing the Rome-based cybersecurity firm at $1.7 billion. The company, which secures over 2 billion connected devices across sectors like aerospace, automotive and healthcare, is expanding its focus from IoT to protecting physical AI systems such as robots, drones and self-driving cars.
OpenArm is a newly released open-source 7-degree-of-freedom humanoid arm built for physical AI research, offering high backdrivability and compliance for safe interaction with humans. A complete bimanual system costs $6,500, and the project includes a standardized 'OpenArm Cell' testing environment for reproducible research. The team is inviting contributors, researchers, and manufacturers to join development.
Hebbian Robotics, part of YC's Summer 2026 batch, has released HFlow, an open source SDK designed to manage large-scale multimodal data pipelines for robotics and physical AI. The tool automates orchestration, versioning, quality checks, and provenance tracking for datasets combining video, sensor state, and action data, using MCAP as its standard input/output format. The project is currently pre-v1 but functional end-to-end for local use.
At the Actuate conference, robotics AI builders acknowledged that while robot bodies keep improving, the underlying AI models still can't reliably perform valuable work. This gap was underscored by Unitree's stock losing nearly half its value days after its blockbuster IPO valued the Chinese robot maker at $66 billion.