Mitsui Fudosan Establishes Physical AI Development Hub in Kumamoto

German robotics startup RobCo has sold shares in a deal that values the company at more than $1 billion, double the level hit earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported. RobCo said it is selling $40 million worth of shares, most of them sold by employees, to a group of new and existing investors, following a $100 million fundraising in January that valued the business at roughly $500 million. New investors include Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective, while existing backers participating include Sequoia, Lightspeed, Lingotto, which is backed by the family behind Jeep owner Stellantis, and Leitmotif, funded by Volkswagen. Founded in 2020 by researchers from the Technical University of Munich, RobCo has sold more than 1,000 robots to industrial customers including German automaker BMW, and its new Alfie robot is central to its pitch of offsetting labor shortages and cutting costs. Robotics and physical AI startups raised $33.4 billion in the first half of the year, more than in all of 2025, according to PitchBook.

Efort announced on September 30 that the company and its controlling subsidiary Qizhi Robot received a total of 65 million yuan in government subsidy funds for the phased acceptance of a lead project, accounting for 13.08% of the company's most recent audited net profit attributable to the parent. This subsidy is a government grant related to income and is expected to have a certain positive impact on the company's future profit. The specific accounting treatment and its impact on the current year's profit and loss remain subject to the results confirmed by the auditor's annual audit. Efort is mainly engaged in the research, development, production, and sales of core underlying technologies and components for intelligent robots, intelligent robots, and system integration. The 2026 semi-annual report shows that during the reporting period, the company achieved total operating revenue of 656 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 28.93%; net profit attributable to the parent was a loss of 56.9258 million yuan, compared with a loss of 152 million yuan in the same period last year; non-GAAP net profit was a loss of 110 million yuan, compared with a loss of 159 million yuan in the same period last year; net cash flow from operating activities was 27.1218 million yuan, compared with negative 171 million yuan in the same period last year.

Movements to form corporate alliances across different industries are gathering pace, centered on physical AI, in which robots and automobiles move autonomously through artificial intelligence. Five companies including the herbal medicine maker Tsumura and the machinery trading firm Yamazen have recently opened a data collection center for physical AI in Narashino City, Chiba Prefecture, where up to 40 robots will repeatedly perform tasks to train robots capable of acting autonomously. Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Fanuc, and Yaskawa Electric, Japan's three major robot makers, are partnering with Fujitsu and the American company Nvidia, while about 20 companies including Kyocera, Kobe Steel, and the software developer Alm are pooling data and expertise with the aim of automating the processing techniques of skilled engineers. Noetra, in which 44 companies including SoftBank and NEC participate, is independently developing an AI foundation model that will serve as the brain of physical AI, aiming for practical application in fiscal 2030, and the government has decided to provide more than 380 billion yen in support for the project this fiscal year.

The Board of Investment traveled to Seoul on September 28-29, 2026, to discuss investment plans with three leading South Korean companies: Hyundai, T-Robotics and COSMAX, and to hold talks with the Federation of Korean Industries, or FKI, on expanding investment cooperation between the two countries. BOI Secretary-General Narit Therdsteerasukdi said the roadshow aims to attract new investment and to build on the investments of South Korean companies already based in Thailand, moving them toward higher value-added activities including research and development, smart manufacturing and advanced technology. Hyundai Motor, which has received BOI promotion to build a battery electric vehicle and lithium-ion battery plant in Samut Prakan province and began actual production in May 2026, discussed ways to upgrade its investment toward advanced technology activities and to link Thai suppliers into its supply chain. T-Robotics, a South Korean industrial robotics specialist and a key partner of Applied Materials, was invited to invest in Thailand to serve the semiconductor and advanced electronics industries, and the company is interested in supporting a high-skilled workforce development program known as Skill Bridge. COSMAX, which researches, develops and manufactures cosmetics for leading global brands and has invested in Thailand since 2018, is investing an additional more than 1.8 billion baht to build a new plant and expand capacity; it has already hired more than 500 Thai workers and plans to raise that to more than 700 next year. FKI said South Korean companies are focusing on expanding investment in three main areas: semiconductors, robotics or physical AI, and artificial intelligence data centers. South Korean investment in ASEAN has more than doubled since 2010 to about 10 billion US dollars a year. From 2021 through the first half of 2026, South Korea submitted 167 investment promotion applications in Thailand with a combined value of more than 65.9 billion baht, mostly in electronics and electrical appliances, machinery and automation systems, metal products and materials, and chemicals.

Inbolt, a Paris-based company that gives industrial robots real-time 3D vision and AI-driven control, has raised $12.5M in a funding round led by new investor Shift4Good, bringing its total funding to $34M. Bridges Climate Transition Partners joined the round, alongside existing investors BNP Paribas Développement and Ora Global. The capital will fund Inbolt's expansion in the US, where it opened a Detroit office in 2026, and in APAC, as well as its entry into two new sectors: data centers and electronics manufacturing. Inbolt's hardware-agnostic software runs natively on major robot platforms including FANUC, ABB, KUKA, Yaskawa, Comau and Universal Robots, and is already deployed on more than 200 robots in over 100 factories across three continents, with clients including Bosch, Beko, Flex, Ford, Stellantis and Toyota. Founded in 2019 by Rudy Cohen, Albane Dersy and Louis Dumas, Inbolt was ranked third on the Sifted 100: France & Benelux on the strength of a two-year revenue CAGR of over 500%.