The Humanoid Hangover

Two days after SoftBank’s $5.4 billion leap into “Physical AI,” the robotics world is already showing signs of vertigo.

A new wave of humanoid startups, from Figure AI to Tesla’s Optimus, is drawing eye-popping valuations despite limited real-world deployment. The result is a market where capital intensity rivals semiconductor fabrication, but commercial readiness looks years away.

The latest caution flag came from Rodney Brooks, the iRobot founder and one of the field’s most respected voices, who warned that humanoids lack the one feature money can’t accelerate: dexterity. 

Fine-motor coordination, grasping, balancing, manipulating, remains the unsolved frontier, and without it, most humanoids can’t perform meaningful work.

That hasn’t stopped investors. Figure’s $39 billion valuation, Tesla’s public demos, and a string of venture rounds for robotics hopefuls have created an echo chamber reminiscent of early self-driving hype. 

NVIDIA’s own researchers admit that scaling humanoids may take “a decade or more,” even as the company builds chips and software to enable them.

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The humanoid boom was inevitable once AI crossed from code to motion. Investors and corporates chasing the “next frontier” after AI infrastructure are now flooding the gap between intelligence and embodiment, the so-called “Physical AI” layer.

The problem: the physics of the human form are not venture-scale.

Safety and liability loom large. Fady Saad of Cybernetix Ventures warns that humanoids working alongside people introduce new risk categories, from mechanical failure to cybersecurity. “If this thing falls on pets or kids, it will hurt them,” he told TechCrunch. “And what if it gets hacked?”

Timelines are another constraint. NVIDIA’s Sanja Fidler compared the current humanoid moment to 2017’s self-driving euphoria, tangible in demos, elusive in deployment. 

Bill Dally, NVIDIA’s chief scientist, echoed that sentiment: “It’s hard — really hard — to fully deliver.”

Even believers concede it’s early. Eclipse Partners’ Seth Winterroth notes that humanoids introduce “sixty-plus degrees of freedom,” making them orders of magnitude more complex to control than industrial arms. 

That complexity extends to unit economics, it’s unclear how these systems can be built or serviced profitably at scale.

Tesla’s Optimus, announced in 2021 and re-introduced last year, still operates under remote guidance. Figure AI’s valuation now rivals mid-cap industrials despite limited disclosure on deployed units.

Not all robotics momentum is misplaced. Startups like Proception and Loomia are making progress in tactile sensing, embedding artificial “touch” into limbs and grippers. K-Scale Labs logged 100 preorders for its humanoid prototype within five days, and Hugging Face sold $1 million worth of its Reachy Mini robots within a week of launch.

The more likely near-term frontier isn’t humanoids, but specialized autonomy, such as warehouse robots, medical assistants, and industrial manipulators tuned for narrow, repetitive tasks. These niches deliver revenue long before general-purpose robots arrive.

Investor Signal

For now, “Physical AI” is still assembling its body.
Humanoids remain a promise in prototype form, and promises, as the last cycle showed, don’t scale on sentiment alone.

Los Angeles is about to see something unusual weaving between traffic lights and palm trees; food deliveries gliding down the sidewalk on four wheels. 

Serve Robotics, a once-niche startup in the autonomy space, just signed a partnership with DoorDash that puts a thousand of its AI-driven delivery robots to work across five major cities.

Built by Magna International and powered by Nvidia processors, the bright white couriers move at 11 miles per hour, navigate intersections, and politely stop for pedestrians. 

They’ve already completed over 100,000 restaurant runs. Serve doesn’t sell the robots; it rents them per trip — autonomy as a service. CEO Ali Kashani says the fleet will double by year-end, most working under the DoorDash banner.

The economics could be transformative. The “last mile,” the hardest and most expensive link in delivery logistics, costs humans about $10 per trip. Serve’s target is one dollar. 

That math explains why SERV’s stock jumped 29 percent on Thursday even as DoorDash slipped 2 percent.

Investor Signal

In a week dominated by humanoid hype, Serve’s sidewalk fleet reminds investors that automation’s winning plays will start small and specialized. 

While capital floods into robots that mimic us, Serve is scaling robots that serve us. This is not speculative sci-fi, it’s autonomy that bills by the mile and proves the business case one burrito at a time.

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While AI and robotics dominate headlines, the life sciences world is in the middle of its own quiet consolidation wave.

Johnson & Johnson is reportedly in talks to acquire Protagonist Therapeutics, a California biotech with drugs that could reshape treatment for autoimmune and rare blood disorders.

The two companies already share lab space, figuratively speaking. They’ve been co-developing an oral therapy for ulcerative colitis and psoriasis, and J&J already owns a small stake in Protagonist. 

An acquisition would deepen that partnership and add another promising asset, rusfertide, a potential treatment for polycythemia vera, a chronic blood cancer.

For J&J, the timing is strategic. Stelara, its once-mighty immune drug, is now under assault from cheaper biosimilars. 

The company has spent much of 2025 playing offense: it bought Intra-Cellular Therapies for $15 billion in January, and now it’s turning to smaller, high-impact targets like Protagonist to replenish its growth pipeline.

Investor Signal

This is how Big Pharma reinvents itself, one molecule at a time. 

The Novo-Akero deal earlier this week signaled a shift toward metabolic and immune therapies; J&J’s move confirms it. 

Investors looking for the next AI trade may find the real arms race is biochemical, not digital, where innovation is slow, expensive, and deeply human.

Rocket Lab’s stock has been on a vertical climb, up more than 20 percent this week and nearly tripled since January, as a steady stream of new launch contracts pushes the aerospace upstart into the industry’s top flight. 

The company announced fresh deals with Japan’s space agency, JAXA, for missions scheduled in December and 2026, alongside a multi-launch agreement with Q-shu Pioneers of Space. 

Those add to ten new missions booked with Synspective, a Japanese satellite operator, bringing Rocket Lab’s contracted backlog to record levels.

Founded as the scrappy alternative to SpaceX, Rocket Lab has matured into a bona fide commercial launch provider with a reliable cadence and global customer base. 

The surge in orders coincides with a broader boom in space tech, a sector flush with government contracts and IPO enthusiasm from Firefly Aerospace, Voyager Technologies, and Karman Holdings.

There’s also a bit of market physics at play. Roughly 14 percent of Rocket Lab’s float was sold short heading into October, meaning the rally likely forced traders to cover bearish bets, amplifying the gains.

Investor Signal

Rocket Lab is evolving from a speculative “space startup” into a recurring revenue story powered by government partnerships and private constellations. 

As capital floods into humanoids, quantum, and AI, the quiet renaissance in launch infrastructure signals that space remains the ultimate hardware frontier, and Rocket Lab, unlike many peers, is already cashing its payloads.

Three themes tied this week together: humanoids chasing dexterity, robots mastering delivery, and rockets defining precision. Each represents a different stage of technological realism, the dreamers, the doers, and the deployers.

Serve’s sidewalk bots show what happens when autonomy meets economics. J&J’s biotech bets prove that innovation still needs patience. Rocket Lab’s rise reminds us that infrastructure, physical, orbital, or biological, underpins every cycle of hype that follows.

The next frontier of investing isn’t about guessing which technology wins. It’s about recognizing which ones actually leave the lab, the launch pad, or the curb, and start earning.