Meta Platforms Acquires Humanoid Robot Startup Assured Robot Intelligence

By Elias Schisgall

Meta Platforms acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a startup trying to build humanoid robots.

The company declined to disclose the terms of the deal. The acquisition was reported earlier by Bloomberg.

"We acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a company at the frontier of robotic intelligence designed to enable robots to understand, predict, and adapt to human behaviors in complex and dynamic environments," a Meta spokesperson said in a Friday statement.

The startup's team, led by Lerrel Pinto and Xiaolong Wang, will join Meta to focus on optimizing its models for robotics applications, the spokesperson said.

Disclosure of Meta's deal comes two days after the company boosted its projected capital expenditures for this year, citing expectations of higher component prices and additional artificial-intelligence data-center costs. The company raised its projected capital spending by $10 billion to a new range of $125 billion to $145 billion for 2026.

Meta has shifted resources away from its augmented reality initiative known as the Metaverse and toward AI. Last month, the company released a new large language model called Muse Spark, which Meta has said is competitive with leading models from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

Investors have viewed Meta's spending plans with some skepticism. Shares retreated following the company's earnings release on Wednesday, and the stock is down 9.4% in the last five days. Shares ended the week at $608.75 each.

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has outlined a vision to supply "personal superintelligence" to billions of people. Mizuho analysts wrote in a note earlier this week that though Zuckerberg's vision remains light on details, the picture is coming increasingly into view.

"It remains vague, but we can see his agentic consumer focused vision start to take shape," the analysts wrote. "The improving confidence from management was palpable."

Write to Elias Schisgall at elias.schisgall@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 01, 2026 16:40 ET (20:40 GMT)