Meta acquired humanoid robotics startup Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI) for an undisclosed sum, the company announced in May 2026, adding a specialized AI team to its growing robotics efforts.
ARI’s entire team, including co-founders Xiaolong Wang and Lerrel Pinto, will join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs research division. Wang previously worked as a researcher at Nvidia and as an associate professor at UC San Diego. Pinto formerly taught at NYU and co-founded kid-size humanoid startup Fauna Robotics, which Amazon acquired last month. ARI had previously raised an undisclosed seed round from AI seed firm AIX Ventures.
The startup was developing foundation models for humanoid robots capable of performing physical tasks such as household chores — models designed to help robots understand, predict, and adapt to human behaviors in complex environments.
“This team, led by Lerrel Pinto and Xiaolong Wang, 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,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch.
Meta researchers have been working on humanoid robotics technology for years. A leaked memo from roughly a year ago outlined the company’s plans to build a consumer-facing humanoid robot, encompassing both AI models and hardware.
The acquisition reflects a broader industry push into humanoid robotics. Market forecasts for the sector vary widely — Goldman Sachs projects the market will reach $38 billion by 2035, while Morgan Stanley estimates $5 trillion by 2050. Many AI experts also argue that reaching artificial general intelligence (AGI) — the theoretical point at which AI matches or exceeds human-level intelligence across all domains — may require training models through direct physical interaction in the real world, a role robots could play.
Source: TechCrunch