Unitree Just Priced Its IPO at $9 Billion, Two Billion Above Its Original Target.

Turn AI into a real income opportunity.

AI is no longer just a tool for getting work done. It’s opening new ways to build businesses, create products, offer services, and generate income.

Discover 200+ curated ways to make money with AI, from content creation and e-commerce to gaming and emerging digital markets, with practical strategies you can start exploring today.

1  Unitree priced its Shanghai IPO at $9 billion, two billion above its original target, on the back of quadrupled revenue.

The Chinese humanoid robot maker priced its shares at 150.8 yuan, valuing the company at $9 billion against an earlier $7 billion target. Revenue more than quadrupled to $238 million in 2025, with humanoid robots now the company's largest business line. Unitree has flagged US trade restrictions as a risk, since American sales made up 13.3% of last year's revenue — a real exposure if the export environment tightens further from here.

2  A Qualcomm-powered humanoid robot face-planted live on stage at Computex, and the company says its fall-safety system worked exactly as designed.

The robot pitched forward and collapsed while walking out to co-present a live keynote in Taiwan, in a clip that spread fast across social media. Qualcomm blamed a communication glitch and said the robot's safe-collapse sequence engaged correctly. Whether or not the fall itself was embarrassing, a working safe-collapse system firing on cue in front of a live audience is arguably the more important story: it is the reliability layer that determines whether humanoid robots are safe to deploy around people at all. Watch the moment here.

3  US schools are piloting pepper-spray drones designed to reach a shooter within 15 seconds, raising real questions about misidentification.

Several schools across Florida, Georgia, and Colorado are testing Campus Guardian Angels, remotely operated drones that can smash through windows at 60 mph and deploy pepper spray, sirens, and flashing lights. The drones are teleoperated from Austin, Texas, hundreds of miles from any of the schools using them. The program's central tension is unresolved: a system fast enough to matter in an active-shooter scenario is also a system with very little room to correctly distinguish a real threat from a false alarm in the seconds it has to decide.

Demon droid. A nearly seven-foot horned, four-legged robotic centaur called Threehalves has gone viral after images blew up across social media. Built by a small California team, it is controlled via a game controller from a safe distance, purpose-built to send a machine rather than a person into hazardous environments. The design is unsettling by intention, not accident.

Pick and place. DoorDash's Dot delivery robots can navigate miles of roads and sidewalks autonomously, but they cannot pick up an order from a restaurant counter. So DoorDash is now paying gig workers through its app to drive to restaurants and manually load orders into the robots. A small but genuinely revealing glimpse of automation's last-mile problem: the hardest part of a delivery pipeline to automate is often the least glamorous ten seconds of it.

Moon shot. Elon Musk told investors on SpaceX's debut earnings call that robots will eventually build factories on the moon, enabling solar-powered mass accelerators and an economy he estimates at 1,000 times the size of Earth's. It is the clearest articulation yet of where Musk sees robotics fitting into SpaceX's long-term vision: not just a tool for exploration, but the literal construction crew for an entirely new off-world economy.

Figure climbs ladders. Figure claims its Figure 03 humanoid can climb ladders fully autonomously, a notable advance in balance, perception, and real-world mobility that goes beyond flat-ground walking demos.

China escalates on drones. China has announced countermeasures against Washington, including drone export controls and a ban on dealings with six US entities, as tech tensions between the two countries keep escalating.

BYD enters the race. BYD is entering the humanoid robot race with an August debut at Di Space, putting the EV giant in direct competition with Tesla's Optimus program.

Wayve and Uber get licensed. Wayve and Uber have secured Transport for London licenses for robotaxis, moving both companies a step closer to launching supervised self-driving rides in the city.

Mitsubishi goes industrial. Mitsubishi will mass-produce up to 1,000 humanoid robots a month on an unused Kyoto engine line, a strong signal of automakers pushing further into physical AI using infrastructure they already own.

A robotic hand caught a baseball out of the air, and the fingers moved to cup it automatically on contact.

San Francisco-based Foundation Robotics unveiled a tendon-driven robotic hand that catches a baseball in flight, demonstrating the kind of fast, precise, reactive gripping that has historically eluded robotic systems. The fingers automatically adjust their shape to cup round objects the instant they make contact, which is a materially harder engineering problem than gripping something stationary. It brings robotic dexterity meaningfully closer to human-level reflexive control, the category of task that has consistently separated impressive demos from genuinely useful hands.

Ready to transform artificial intelligence from a buzzword into your personal revenue generator?

HubSpot’s groundbreaking guide "200+ AI-Powered Income Ideas" is your gateway to financial innovation in the digital age.

Inside you'll discover:

Download your guide today and unlock a future where artificial intelligence powers your success. Your next income stream is waiting.

Get The Free Guide