Humanoid robotics is having its consolidation moment. In the span of five months, Mobileye acquired humanoid maker Mentee Robotics for $900 million in January, Amazon bought Fauna Robotics in March, and Meta picked up Assured Robot Intelligence in May. For the companies supplying the picks and shovels of this gold rush, the buying spree is a signal worth reading closely — and NexCOBOT sits about as close to the action as a component maker can get.
The Taiwanese firm, spun out of NEXCOM Group’s IoT Automation Solutions business in 2018 and based in New Taipei City, supplies motion controllers, functional safety controllers, peripheral components, and design verification consulting to robot developers. In an interview with The Robot Report, general manager Jenny Shern explained how the physical AI land grab looks from the supplier side — and where the market goes next.
Money, for one, has become pickier. “This creates a more selective funding environment for robotics developers,” Shern said of the pullback in early-stage venture capital. “Capital is still available for companies that demonstrate strong technical differentiation and a clear path to commercialization.” In other words: the era of funding a humanoid on a demo reel is winding down, and acquisition by a tech giant has become a legitimate exit.
The buzzword of the moment is AI-native robots, and Shern offers a refreshingly clean definition: robots “originally structured to incorporate AI as a core part of how they perceive, make decisions, and interact with their environment.” Progress is rapid, she said, “especially in perception, motion planning, and human-robot interaction. However, for industrial applications, reliability and safety remain critical requirements.”
Safety happens to be NexCOBOT’s home turf. Its ROBASafe functional safety system is built to compress the long certification slog that keeps new robots off factory floors. “By deploying our certified functional safety controller based on an open system, we helped the client shorten its development cycle from an estimated three to five years down to just two years,” Shern said. The company has also collaborated with German partner Sysgo and BOTFELLOWS on a high-safety-level robotic dynamic safety collaboration space — the kind of infrastructure that lets AI-driven machines share space with humans without a cage.
So where does Big Tech aim next? Shern expects action on both the industrial and consumer fronts. “Established industries like manufacturing, logistics, and warehousing already have clear business use cases for automation,” she said. And the acquisition targets will follow the data: “Robots that generate large amounts of operational data and can benefit directly from advances in AI are likely to attract the most attention from Big Tech.”
As for whether NexCOBOT itself might end up in someone’s shopping cart, Shern kept her cards close, saying only that the company does not disclose internal finances — and that it is “in a highly stable financial position.” Sellers of picks and shovels, after all, rarely need to sell themselves.
