San Francisco gets most of the headlines for AI, but a lot of the robots themselves are designed, tested and built down the Peninsula and across the South Bay. If you're an engineer thinking about a move into physical AI, a founder looking for partners or customers, or just curious about who's building what between Redwood City and San Jose, these are 9 robotics companies with headquarters in the area and a recent milestone worth knowing about. We've listed them roughly north to south.
Dexterity (Redwood City)
Dexterity builds AI-driven robots for logistics, and its flagship DexR is a two-armed mobile robot that unloads boxes from trucks and shipping containers at loading docks. It combines machine vision, force sensing and motion planning so it can handle anything from stiff cardboard to soft plastic packaging. The Robot Report covered its $95 million round at a $1.65 billion valuation in March 2025, led by Lightspeed and Sumitomo Corp.
Bear Robotics (Redwood City)
Bear Robotics makes indoor service and delivery robots, including Servi and Carti, along with fleet management software for restaurants, hospitality and other indoor spaces. In January 2025, LG Electronics raised its stake to 51% and became the majority owner, per The Robot Report.
Mind Robotics (Palo Alto)
Mind Robotics spun out of Rivian in 2025 to build AI models, hardware and deployment tools for industrial and factory robots, using conventional industrial designs rather than humanoids. TechCrunch reported a $500 million Series A in March co-led by Accel and Andreessen Horowitz, and AI Business reported a further $400 million led by Kleiner Perkins in May, taking total funding past $1 billion.
1X Technologies (Palo Alto)
1X is building NEO, a humanoid robot designed for the home, with an AI system it calls NEO Cortex running on NVIDIA Jetson Thor. In May, The Robot Report reported that 1X began full-scale production of NEO at a 58,000 square foot factory in Hayward, keeping both design and manufacturing inside the Bay Area.
Palo Alto has become a real hub for this kind of work, and it's also where some of our own physical AI programming has taken place. Our event The Physical AI Frontier: From Software to the Real World in downtown Palo Alto in October was part of South Bay Renaissance, the Tribe-organized effort to rebuild the South Bay and Peninsula startup and social scene one gathering at a time, which also runs a hardware and robotics interest group for local builders.
Nuro (Mountain View)
Nuro started in 2016 building delivery robots and now licenses its Nuro Driver self-driving system to automakers and mobility companies. In August 2025, it announced a $203 million Series E at a $6 billion valuation, with Uber, NVIDIA, Baillie Gifford and others participating.
Gatik (Mountain View)
Gatik runs autonomous box trucks on short regional routes between distribution centers and stores, a segment the industry calls the middle mile, for customers including PepsiCo, Kroger and Tyson Foods. In August, The Robot Report reported a $200 million Series D led by Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies. Mountain View's autonomy companies also feature in our breakdown of robotics startup funding in Q3 2026.
Intuitive (Sunnyvale)
Intuitive is the established anchor of the local robotics industry, best known for the da Vinci surgical system and the Ion system for lung biopsies. In January, the company announced FDA clearance expanding da Vinci 5 to selected cardiac procedures, including mitral and tricuspid valve repair.
Collaborative Robotics (Santa Clara)
Collaborative Robotics, often shortened to Cobot, builds Proxie, a mobile robot designed to work alongside people in logistics, manufacturing and healthcare. In June, The Robot Report covered the launch of Proxie Gen 2, which adds higher payload, automatic battery swapping, autonomous task identification and an optional two-armed configuration. Its last disclosed funding was a $100 million Series B led by General Catalyst in April 2024, per Crunchbase News.
Figure AI (San Jose)
Figure builds general-purpose humanoid robots and has moved through 3 generations, Figure 01, 02 and 03. In September 2025, TechCrunch reported a Series C of more than $1 billion led by Parkway Venture Capital at a $39 billion post-money valuation. CoStar reported that Figure moved its headquarters to a larger building on North First Street in San Jose, more than tripling its local footprint.
Where South Bay robotics people meet
Meeting the people who work at these companies usually happens in a handful of familiar rooms. The HomeBrew Robotics Club, which traces its roots to the original Homebrew Computer Club, holds a general meeting on the last Wednesday of each month at 7 pm, and its June meeting was held at Maker Nexus, the nonprofit makerspace on Orleans Drive in Sunnyvale. The club has met at other venues over the years, so check each month's announcement before you go.
Stanford also opened the Stanford Robotics Center in November 2024, with research bays, a medical suite and a domestic suite with a working kitchen. It's mostly a research space for students, labs and corporate members, but Stanford's public event listings are worth watching for robotics talks that open the academic side of the scene to outsiders. For a fuller list of clubs, conferences and fairs, see our guide to robotics meetups in the Bay Area, and if you're more interested in startups than robots specifically, our list of places to meet founders in the South Bay is a good companion.
If you want to follow the money as well as the machines, our coverage of the Bedrock Robotics Series C and the open source Microduck robot shows how wide the range of robotics projects has gotten, from autonomous construction equipment to a small robot duck.
Keep the conversation going
The Futurists in Robotics Tribe is where members share news about companies like these, swap job leads and compare notes on humanoids versus purpose-built machines. To meet people face to face, follow the Tribe Events calendar on Luma for upcoming physical AI talks, demo nights and founder dinners around the Peninsula and South Bay.
