At a sold-out conference in San Francisco for people who build robots, the robots were surprisingly hard to find.
This week, 1,500 robotics investors, founders, and engineers packed a cavernous former Army warehouse at Fort Mason, overlooking San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. They came from across the country for Actuate, a conference that bills itself as a middle ground between an academic gathering and a trade show.
A few years ago, a crowd that size would have been hard to imagine. For much of the past two decades, robotics was a difficult sell in Silicon Valley. Now it’s one of tech’s hottest bets, as investors look beyond software for the next wave of AI.
Actuate’s own growth mirrors the industry’s reversal in fortune. Its inaugural event in 2024 drew about 250 people. A year later, 500 people attended. This year, attendance tripled. Adrian Macneil, cofounder and CEO of Foxglove, the startup that organizes the conference, said they could have sold over 2,000 tickets if the venue had space.
“For most of the past two decades, robotics was seen as an unsuccessful money pit by VCs,” Macneil said in his opening remarks. Now, money is pouring in. Robotics startups raised a record $15 billion globally in 2025, according to Crunchbase, and another $18.8 billion so far this year.
“Physical AI” — once a fringe term, now ubiquitous shorthand for machines that can perceive and act in the real world — was everywhere, from keynote speeches to cocktail-hour chatter.
Beneath the exuberance loomed the industry’s central constraint: As money and talent pour in, hardware remains scarce. I spotted a few robot dogs doing backflips at a booth on my way in, and caught a glimpse of Abi, Andromeda’s multicolored companion humanoid, blowing bubbles into the audience during CEO Grace Brown’s talk. Otherwise, it was slim pickings.
“Hardware is the missing piece,” Theophile Gervet, cofounder and president of Genesis AI, which builds a general-purpose robot called Eno, told me at the conference. “There’s less hardware being built than what the industry needs.”
At Actuate, data vendors outnumbered robots
That gap was especially visible in the conference’s expo hall, where data vendors outnumbered hardware companies and pitched their services to an industry scrambling for the real-world data needed to train robot “brains.” Uber AI Solutions pitched its global network for collecting and labeling AI training data, while Instawork showcased its new wearable camera system that lets gig workers collect real-world data for robots.
Unlike AI chatbots, which were trained on vast amounts of internet data, no comparable trove of physical-world data exists to teach robots how to move through and interact with the real world.
“It’s just an absolute feeding frenzy right now, of people producing all sorts of data, of people buying all sorts of data,” Macneil, a former Coinbase and Cruise executive, told Business Insider. His company, Foxglove, builds software that helps robotics companies analyze data from their machines and improve performance.
One panel, fittingly titled “The Data Wars,” brought researchers from Nvidia, Physical Intelligence, and Generalist, among others, to debate what kinds of training data robots need and how to get it.
Robotics leaders worried about FCC restrictions
The hardware shortage has taken on new urgency since the Federal Communications Commission imposed restrictions on new foreign-made “advanced robotic devices” last month. US manufacturers have welcomed protection from subsidized Chinese rivals, while startups and researchers say that losing access to inexpensive Chinese hardware could leave the country further behind.
The move became one of the biggest topics of conversation at the conference. Chinese companies accounted for roughly 90% of global shipments of humanoid robots last year.
“The FCC’s regulation is a bit of a problem,” Sebastian Thrun, who founded Google’s self-driving car project that later became Waymo, said during his surprise keynote. Then, in a fitting sign of the times, he revealed that he is working on a new robotics startup, Dulo.
Fred Parietti, CEO of Multiply Labs, said he had anticipated the US and China decoupling and built much of his company’s supply chain in Europe. His company, which builds robotics systems for manufacturing cell and gene therapies, still relies on Chinese humanoids to load and unload equipment without introducing contamination.
“There is no alternative right now,” Parietti told Business Insider.
Chinese robots from Unitree took center stage
None of that dampened the mood. New graduates and young engineers, who might have chased cushy Big Tech jobs in another era, packed the conference halls. Loud pop music thumped from the morning, and cocktails flowed by early afternoon. For every one woman, there were 10 men.
The exuberance spilled into the night. At The Interval, a bar run by a nonprofit devoted to “long-term thinking” that counts Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison among its donors, robotics veterans like Ken Goldberg, a UC Berkeley professor, and Rodney Brooks, the founder of iRobot, mingled with Ph.D. dropouts starting companies.
Next door at German beer hall Radhaus, a line snaked out the door for an Nvidia-sponsored soirée. On the last evening, DJ Umami, the resident DJ for the San Francisco Giants, closed out the conference with a set.
At one moment, robots took center stage — though they, too, came from China. As the Chinese humanoid maker Unitree went public and its shares soared more than 600%, two of its humanoids — one red, one blue, both wearing fluorescent wigs — entered a small ring in the main hall for Robot Fight Night. Attendees controlled them remotely as drinks flowed from an open bar.
“Taste the knuckles of AI coming at your chin,” the commentator shouted.
I only saw a few moments of actual contact during the bot-versus-bot matches. More often, the robots punched thin air or ended up facing away from each other.
The spectacle drew a huge crowd at first. As the matches wore on, the crowd thinned.
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