Key insights
- Meta's acquisition of Assured Robot Intelligence signals increased investment in humanoid robotics. This move aligns with similar initiatives by Tesla, Google, and Amazon, suggesting a growing trend in the tech sector. While the immediate market impact is limited, it reflects ongoing capital allocation towards long-term growth areas.
(Bloomberg) -- Meta Platforms Inc. has acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a startup developing artificial intelligence models for robots, as part of a major initiative to build humanoid technology.
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The social networking giant closed the acquisition Friday, according to a spokesperson. Meta said the startup is “at the frontier of robotic intelligence designed to enable robots to understand, predict and adapt to human behaviors in complex and dynamic environments.” Financial terms weren’t disclosed.
The Assured Robot Intelligence team, which includes co-founders Lerrel Pinto and Xiaolong Wang, will join the Meta Superintelligence Labs research division. The staff will work closely with Meta Robotics Studio, a team launched last year to work on underlying technology for humanoids.
Meta is making a significant investment in humanoids — futuristic robots that can move like humans and assist with physical tasks. The emerging sector has been gaining steam at many of the industry’s biggest companies, including Tesla Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Amazon.com Inc.
Wang was previously a researcher at Nvidia Corp., while Pinto was a co-founder of Fauna Robotics before leaving in 2025. Amazon acquired Fauna in March to help bolster its own humanoid robot effort.
Assured Robot Intelligence employees were concentrated in San Diego and New York. At Meta, the group “will bring a deep expertise in how we can design our models and frontier capabilities for robot control and self-learning to whole-body humanoid control,” the spokesperson for the social media company said.
Meta’s robotics team, which aims to eventually use technology from the startup, is working on in-house humanoid hardware and the underlying AI that powers it. That includes developing sensors, software and other technology for robots that it will make available to others in the industry, meaning they could ultimately be used by a range of companies.
Meta’s goal is to provide what Google’s Android operating system and Qualcomm Inc.’s chips did for the phone industry by building a foundation for the rest of the market, Bloomberg News reported last year.
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