Tags: Agility Robotics

Corporate venture arm TDK Ventures chief Nicolas Sauvage is doubling down on the less glamorous side of artificial intelligence. The French executive, who launched the fund in 2019, has already steered $500 million into inference chips, specialized robots and emerging battery chemistries. His most visible win, Groq’s $6.9 billion‑valued inference processor, exemplifies a strategy that looks four years ahead to bottlenecks and backs founders already solving them. Sauvage now watches CPUs, Chinese “vibe manufacturing” and the quest for dexterous machines as the next sources of competitive advantage. Read more

iRobot co‑founder Brooks recounts a near‑miss with an Agility Robotics Digit humanoid that fell when he got too close, leading him to keep a three‑meter distance from moving bipedal robots. He argues that current walking mechanisms make safety certification for shared human‑robot zones virtually impossible, limiting the deployment of humanoids in health‑care and factories. Looking ahead, Brooks predicts that within 15 years “humanoids” will look nothing like today’s bipedal machines, favoring wheels, varied arm counts, and novel sensor placements. He notes that billions spent on vision‑only, rigid humanoids may be misplaced, while academic work such as MIT’s tactile glove shows promise but remains far from true human‑like dexterity. Read more