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Hyundai takes full control of Boston Dynamics as SoftBank exits for $325 million
(startupfortune.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2026
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Technology
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3 billion valuation sounds low. Is Tesla more likely to deliver?
Does their CEO even DO Ketamine? How many outlandish promises have they made recently? Have we even seen ONE "Roman" salute at a government function?
How are we even supposed to determine a valuation?
I used to work across the street from Boston Dynamics and would regularly see them testing robots in their parking lot & surrounding grassy/hilly areas. At one point they actually gave a bunch of folks in my company a tour of their labs. I still keep tabs on them from time to time because I find what they do absolutely amazing.
From what I’ve seen of the past 15 years or so of watching them I believe that Boston Dynamics is well in front of Tesla when it comes to robotics. Especially when you see gaffes by Tesla like that video that seems to show their robot was actually being controlled by a person wearing a VR headset.
Thats definitely not a valuation youd expect for a company that had any chance of delivering. General purpose humanoid robots are the other half of the AI-singularity-permanent oligarchy vision: data centers to replace knowledge workers and robots to replace physical labor, then...I dont know, fly off to Mars or something?
Anyway, if there was a chance they were close to producing a robot that could actually function as a human analog they should be pushing a trillion dollar valuation in this market.
You assume that the market is rational. I think we left that road some decades ago.
The market is people. People have never been rational.
Market is like, what, couple thousand humans? Rest is bots.
One thing I haven’t understood with BD is why they haven’t thrown tremendous amounts of computing horsepower behind ONE humanoid robot to make it almost human, just to show it’s possible, then to slowly eat away at the costs. Just like has been done with AI and datacenters. BD robots are cool but clearly not at all intelligent so they’ve been stuck in this zombie state for decades now.
I think the newer robots companies actually might try to have humanoid robots powered by massive AI datacenters and make them “intelligent.” That’s the approach at least.
I think youve answered your own question. They, and everyone else making humanoid robots, have almost certainly tried. The fact that they are still having actors control their demos using VR systems tells you how well those tests went.