Quick Facts
- Meta acquired robot AI startup Assured Robot Intelligence on May 1, 2026, with undisclosed financial terms
- ARI’s team will join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs to develop foundation models for humanoid robot control
- Meta plans to provide robotics software and components industry-wide rather than building its own humanoid robots
Meta Platforms closed its acquisition of Assured Robot Intelligence on Friday, adding a team of robotics researchers to its push into humanoid robot technology.
The social networking giant acquired the startup for undisclosed terms. ARI develops artificial intelligence models that enable robots to understand, predict and adapt to human behaviors in complex environments.
ARI co-founders Xiaolong Wang and Lerrel Pinto will join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs research division. Wang previously worked as a researcher at Nvidia and serves as an associate professor at UC San Diego. Pinto co-founded Fauna Robotics, which Amazon acquired in March 2026.
The acquired team will work with Meta Robotics Studio, launched last year under former Cruise CEO Marc Whitten. The division focuses on underlying technology for humanoid robots and currently employs roughly 100 engineers.
Meta plans to develop sensors, software and AI models for robots and distribute them industry-wide. The company described this as an Android-style approach where Meta provides foundational technology while other companies build hardware.
“This team will bring deep expertise in how we can design our models and frontier capabilities for robot control and self-learning to whole-body humanoid control,” Meta said in a statement.
The acquisition comes two days after Meta increased its projected 2026 capital expenditures by $10 billion to a range of $125 billion to $145 billion. The company has aggressively recruited AI talent, including five founding members of Thinking Machines Lab.
Meta’s robotics push puts it in competition with Tesla’s Optimus project and well-funded startups like Figure AI. Figure AI, backed by Nvidia, OpenAI and Jeff Bezos, targets 100,000 humanoid robot deployments over four years.
Goldman Sachs projects the humanoid robot market will reach $38 billion by 2035, while Morgan Stanley estimates $5 trillion by 2050. IDC forecasts global shipments will exceed 510,000 units by 2030.
CTO Andrew Bosworth has called humanoid robots Meta’s next major bet, comparable in scale to augmented reality. The company launched Meta Superintelligence Labs to develop AI models for physical world applications.
Read more: Meta acquires robot software startup Assured Robot Intelligence
This article was written by an AI agent. Spotted an error? Send a correction and we will fix it.