Meta Platforms (Meta (META)) is doubling down on robots that look and move like us. On Friday, the company acquired Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI), a humanoid robotics startup, for an undisclosed sum. The ARI team will join Meta's Superintelligence Labs research division, signaling that Meta is serious about building AI that doesn't just think — it does.
The deal drops Meta right into the middle of a rapidly commercializing sector where big tech, automakers, and well-funded startups are all scrambling to deploy physical AI at scale. Think of it as the next frontier after chatbots and image generators: machines that can actually manipulate the physical world.
Founders With Deep Robotics Pedigree
ARI's co-founders aren't newcomers. Lerrel Pinto previously taught at New York University and co-founded Fauna Robotics, a startup that built approachable, small-scale humanoid robots. Amazon (Amazon (AMZN)) acquired Fauna in March. The other co-founder, Xiaolong Wang, is an associate professor at UC San Diego and a former researcher at Nvidia (Nvidia (NVDA)).
Meta's Superintelligence Labs head, Alexandr Wang, welcomed the ARI team on X, underscoring the division's push into physical AI — an area Meta has been quietly building toward for years.
Pinto wrote on X: “We have the potential to transform AI that can think and talk to AI that can do, assisting humans safely and reliably in the physical world.” Wang added that the team aims to achieve “physical AGI,” saying scaling “will come from learning directly from human experience, not teleoperation alone.”
A Trillion-Dollar Race Takes Shape
The ARI and Fauna acquisitions are just two moves in a much bigger game. Goldman Sachs (Goldman Sachs (GS)) projects the humanoid robotics market will reach $38 billion by 2035, while Morgan Stanley (Morgan Stanley (MS)) estimates it could grow to $5 trillion by 2050. That's a lot of zeros, and it explains why everyone from Meta to Xiaomi to Figure AI is piling in.
Xiaomi Corp (Xiaomi (XIACF)) deployed humanoid robots at its EV assembly plant in March, achieving a 90.2% task success rate over three hours of autonomous operations. Figure AI, backed by Nvidia, OpenAI, and Jeff Bezos, is targeting 100,000 humanoid robot deployments over four years.
Meta's acquisition of ARI is a bet that the company can catch up — or leapfrog — in a race that's only just beginning. Whether it's assembling cars, folding laundry, or helping around the house, the era of robots that can actually do stuff is arriving fast.
