Austin-based humanoid robotics startup Apptronik has raised $520 million at a reported $5 billion valuation in a round co-led by B Capital and Google, according to a CNBC report. The financing brings the company's Series A total to roughly $935 million and will fund a major expansion of Apollo humanoid robot production, with new facilities planned in Texas and California.
What the money will do
The capital will go toward scaling manufacturing of the Apollo humanoid, growing engineering and operations teams, and expanding the company's footprint with new sites in Texas and California, according to CNBC. Apptronik currently employs around 300-350 people and is preparing for a significant hiring push as it moves toward higher-volume production.
Apollo in the field
Apollo is already being trialled on real production lines with marquee partners. Mercedes-Benz is testing the robot in vehicle manufacturing, GXO Logistics — the world's largest pure-play contract logistics provider — is piloting Apollo inside warehouse operations, and contract electronics giant Jabil is using it in its production processes. These deployments mirror a broader pattern of humanoid robot mass production now visible across the industry.
Google's role and Gemini Robotics
Google's participation as a co-lead is notable beyond the cheque size: Apptronik recently partnered with Google DeepMind to integrate Gemini Robotics AI models into Apollo, giving the robot access to one of the most capable general-purpose foundation models for embodied AI. The deal positions Apollo as one of the first major humanoid platforms to lean on a frontier vision-language-action model from a hyperscaler.
A crowded but accelerating race
The Series A puts Apptronik among the best-funded humanoid developers in the world, alongside Tesla's Optimus program, Figure AI, Agility Robotics, Norway-and-US-based 1X, and China's Unitree and AgiBot. The race is increasingly defined by who can move fastest from working demos to deployed commercial fleets — a transition we explored in our analysis of the multi-trillion-dollar humanoid robotics market, and which has been visible in deals such as the Schaeffler factory humanoid deployment deal and Japan Airlines humanoid trial at Haneda Airport.
From NASA's Valkyrie to a $5B humanoid
Apollo is the culmination of nearly a decade of work at Apptronik, whose team grew out of the Human Centered Robotics Lab at the University of Texas at Austin and contributed to NASA's Valkyrie humanoid. With 15 prior robot generations behind it and now around 350 employees, Apptronik enters the next phase of the humanoid race with a fully-funded production roadmap and a frontier-AI partner on its cap table.
Reporting based on coverage from CNBC (Lora Kolodny) and the original press release distributed via InvestorBrandNetwork, June 2026.