Runway Opens 27B Robot Model as Agile Robots Raises $500M
Runway released Praxis-1, a 27-billion-parameter world action model published under Apache 2.0, and it ranks first on NVIDIA's RoboLab leaderboard. On the same day, 思灵机器人（Agile Robots）closed a $500 million round at an $8.5 billion valuation led by SoftBank, with Nvidia and Hitachi participating.
The two events sit at opposite ends of the capital curve. The Agile Robots round ranks among the largest in embodied AI this year, and its participant list places a compute supplier and an industrial conglomerate inside the cap table, which ties the valuation to deployment commitments rather than demo performance. 擎天租（Qingtianzu）raised a nine-figure RMB strategic round and repositioned from robot rental toward productivity services, a smaller instrument testing whether RaaS unit economics hold beyond single leases.
On the technical route, Runway's open weights give teams a self-hostable pretrained base, while 北京人形机器人创新中心（Beijing Humanoid）placed eight papers in the CoRL 2026 main conference, evidence that the in-house full-stack path still commands research capacity. Sharpa's Wave hands appearing in Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics 2.5 demonstrations indicate dexterous hardware is consolidating into a layer shared across intelligence providers.
星海图（Galaxea）chief scientist 赵行（Hang Zhao）used his CoRL early-career keynote to place the binding constraint on inference latency rather than controller design, a framing that redirects budgets toward on-device compute and model efficiency. 加速进化（Booster Robotics）demonstrated whole-body teleoperation on the T2 humanoid, and Noetix took Boomy to Kickstarter; the first is an interim path to manipulation work, the second a demand probe outside industrial procurement.
海康机器人（Hikrobot）completed its shareholding reform and filed for IPO counseling, which would supply the sector's first large public comparable in machine vision and AMR. Two observation points follow: whether open-weight bases measurably cut pretraining spend for mid-tier teams within two quarters, and whether service contracts convert into recurring revenue rather than disguised equipment leases.