Meta acquires robotics startup Assured Robot Intelligence to build humanoid platform

Meta has acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a startup specializing in whole-body robot control models and tactile sensors, as it pushes deeper into humanoid robotics. The deal, announced Friday, brings co-founders Lerrel Pinto and Xiaolong Wang into Meta Superintelligence Labs. Financial terms were not disclosed. Pinto previously co-founded Fauna Robotics, which Amazon acquired in March along with its bipedal robot Sprout. Wang is a former Nvidia researcher and associate professor at UC San Diego who won the MLSys 2024 Best Paper Award for work on AI model optimization. Assured Robot Intelligence was concentrated in San Diego and New York before the acquisition. Meta has described its robotics ambition as replicating what Google's Android operating system and Qualcomm's chips did for smartphones: build the foundational intelligence layer and let manufacturers create the hardware. The company launched Meta Robotics Studio last year, hired former Cruise CEO Marc Whitten to lead the effort, and began recruiting roughly 100 engineers to develop in-house humanoid hardware alongside the AI models that power it. Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth has framed humanoid robots as Meta's next major bet, comparable in scale to augmented reality, a category in which the company has already spent tens of billions through its Reality Labs division. The platform strategy is explicit. Meta intends to make sensors, software, and AI models available to the broader robotics industry, allowing manufacturers it does not own to build machines powered by Meta technology. In smartphones, Google gave away Android and captured value through search, advertising, and the Play Store. In robotics, Meta would distribute the intelligence layer and capture value through data, model ecosystems, and integration with platforms used by 3.3 billion people daily. Meta has been acquiring AI talent aggressively in recent months, hiring five founding members of Thinking Machines Lab to strengthen its research bench.