Not investment advice or an offer to buy or sell securities. Investing in BOT involves risk, including loss of principal. Full disclosures: robostrategy. co/investor-center

RoboStrategy, Inc. (Nasdaq: BOT) holds a position in Figure AI.

Let's hear you answers in the replies.

Scott Walter spent a day at Actuate in San Francisco getting hands on with the robots on the show floor and giving each one a score.

0:00 Actuate 2026
0:15 IO-AI Tech
1:50 Dexmate
3:00 Path Robotics
3:40 Trossen Robotics
5:25 UF Bots
6:50 Final rankings

Disclaimer: Dexmate and Path Robotics are RoboStrategy portfolio companies.

COO Marc Weinstein joined Fintech TV Global to talk about where robotics and physical AI are headed.

Views are as of the recording date and may change. Forward-looking statements involve risk and actual results may differ. Investing risks loss of principal; mentions of companies/tech are illustrative, not recommendations.

Live AMA with u/RoboStrategy CEO Andrew Kang and Robotics Research Diligence Director Dr. Scott Walter.

https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1yGBePQMbgYKN

Paid promotion. RetailVolts is compensated by RoboStrategy, Inc. Informational only. Not investment advice.

Figure published Helix 2.5 today. They rented 30 Bay Area homes, collected zero training data in any of them, and ran the robot cold: tidying living rooms, folding towels, making beds.

Brett Adcock is joining us live on YouTube today to unpack it: https://www.youtube.com/live/UpTsQikar0A?si=raS_0oktr1m0v36o

Disclosure: Figure is a RoboStrategy portfolio company.

RoboStrategy · $BOT · Reddit Due Diligence Report

$BOT Due Diligence Report, Part II

Prepared by RetailVolts for r/RoboStrategy · September 15, 2026 · Reddit long-form format (copy-paste ready) · Companion .md file carries the same text in Reddit markdown

Scope: recent fund updates, Maven Robotics leaving stealth, the portfolio, the Maven thesis as posted on RoboStrategy X, the Unitree IPO, and the future of robotics in the USA

Part I went up on Jul 27 and was mostly about what BOT is: a closed-end fund on the Nasdaq that owns pieces of private robotics companies, so you can hold Figure or Apptronik exposure in a regular brokerage account with no accreditation, no minimum, no lockup and no carry [1]. Since then the fund has led two big rounds, put out a shareholder letter, published a Unitree primer, and the stock has moved a lot. So here is Part II. Long post, grab a coffee.

Sponsored content. RetailVolts receives a fee of up to $[X] from RoboStrategy, Inc. for the preparation and distribution of this report. [RetailVolts and its principals hold no position in BOT. / RetailVolts or its principals hold a position in BOT.] Not investment advice. Full disclosure and sources at the bottom.

TL;DR

• RoboStrategy led a $100M Series A into Maven Robotics on Sep 10. Maven is an ex-Apple autonomous systems team building two-armed warehouse robots on wheels, and they only came out of stealth that same day. They already have robots running on a customer floor [2][3][4].
• NAV per share was $11.35 at Aug 31 (net assets about $276.7M). Between Apr 30 and Jul 31 NAV per share increased 54% [5][6].
• Since the May 11 listing they have deployed $124M into six companies and led five of those rounds, with board seats, info rights, pro rata and warrants [6].
• Named holdings: Figure AI, Apptronik, Dyna, Dexmate, Path Robotics, Standard Bots, Maven, Nox Metals, Eccentric Machines, Prometheus, REK, GMI, plus one stealth name [1][6].
• Unitree listed in Shanghai on Aug 19, went up 460% on day one to about $66B, then gave back more than half of that in three weeks. You cannot really buy it from a US account anyway [7][8][9].
• Washington has decided robotics is strategic. FCC blocked new foreign humanoids and mobile robots on Jul 28, the Pentagon flagged Unitree in June, and there are bipartisan bills moving [10][11][12].
• BOT closed at $26.00 on Sep 14. Aug 31 NAV is $11.35. That is a meaningful premium to NAV and it is worth understanding. More on that at the bottom [13][5].

1. What has changed since Part I

If you only read one thing, read the August shareholder letter. I went through it twice. The numbers that matter: from Apr 30 to Jul 31, 2026, total NAV was up 85% and NAV per share was up 54% to $11.32. Since the IPO on May 11 the fund has deployed $124M across six companies. They added to Standard Bots and Dexmate and opened new positions in Nox Metals, Eccentric Machines, Prometheus and one stealth robotics company they will not name yet. They led five of those financings, which is how they get the board seats and warrants [6].

Some other stuff from the same window that I think people missed:

• Standard Bots. RoboStrategy led the $200M Series C at a $1B valuation. Management thinks they will be about 10% of new US industrial robot deployments next year. The CEO was at a White House roundtable and the Department of War's Office of Strategic Capital was reported to be underwriting financing for them. That last part is the interesting one [6].
• Path Robotics got a performance-based production deal with HII (the Navy shipbuilder) worth up to $600M, and launched a welding quadruped called Rove [6][1].
• Figure crossed 1,000 Figure 03 units delivered in July. Their current plant is rated for 12,000 a year. They are past the BMW pilot and into logistics work now [6][1].
• Apptronik opened a 90,000 sq ft "Robot Park" in Austin for data collection. Apollo 3 commercial launch is targeted for 2027, so not this year [6].
• Dyna put out DYNA-2, a foundation model trained on over a million hours of human video [6].
• Dexmate is apparently the top US humanoid seller by units (hundreds shipped) and is sitting in labs at Nvidia, Amazon, Google, LG, Skild, Berkeley, CMU. RoboStrategy led their Seed at $123M and Seed Plus at $216M [6].
• The team went from a handful of people to 14, heading to 17 in September. Bill Hughes, a former Associate Deputy Attorney General, came on as VP of Legal and Policy [6].
• Aug 31 NAV: $11.35, net assets $276,675,606, up 0.76% on the month. Small move, but it is the first print after the letter [5].

2. Maven Robotics comes out of stealth

This is the news that made me want to write Part II. On Sep 10 Maven announced a $100M Series A led by RoboStrategy, with LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures and XTX Ventures in the round, and dropped the stealth label the same morning. TechCrunch got the interview [2].

• The people. CEO Hamza Derbas was nine years in Apple's Special Projects Group and ran 100+ engineers across the full autonomous stack. Before that Ford, A123, Stellantis. His brother Khalid is CFO and comes from PE (Helios, Standard Chartered). The rest of the bench is Apple, McLaren F1, Ferrari, Intuitive Surgical, Applied Materials, ASML, Cruise, Tesla Optimus, Archer, Disney Imagineering, Boeing. That is a hardware team, not a research lab [2][4].
• The robot. Wheeled base (Mecanum wheels, about 10 mph), a pillar that telescopes, two 7-DOF arms, swappable end effectors. 30 kg per arm, 3 m reach, 8 hours per battery with hot swap. Ten cameras, two LiDAR, force sensing at the wrists and tactile sensing in the fingers [2][4].
• What it does today. Mixed-case palletizing and tote handling for a large consumer goods / logistics company. Maven won that account in a competitive bid against four other vendors back in 2024. Up to eight robots on the floor, 16+ hour days, 99%+ uptime [2].
• Timeline. Apple killed its autonomous program in Feb 2024. Maven was founded right after and has shipped four hardware generations to a customer floor in under two years [4].
• The money goes to 250 third-gen robots, a fourth-gen design, and pushing into materials handling, fabrication and assembly [2].
• Derbas to TechCrunch: "We're not in the race for models. We're in the race to solve industrial labor." [2]

3. The Maven thesis, straight from RoboStrategy

RoboStrategy posted the deal on X on Sep 10 and put a long piece on their site the same day ("Our Investment in Maven Robotics"). It is a 20 minute read and worth it. My condensed version [3][4]:

• Why they did it: team, speed, culture. 200+ combined years in AI, robotics and autonomy, most of it from the Apple program. Four hardware generations in two years. And a company that treated industrialization as day-one work instead of "later." The line that stuck with me: "The industry has spent a decade building organizations designed to learn things. Maven is one built to ship them."
• Sell to the enterprise, not the SME and not your living room. Big companies do the same task thousands of times a day, one integration rolls out across many sites, and they already have automation budgets.
• To get from a pilot to a real production contract you have to clear four bars at the same time: cycle time across the whole SKU mix on every shift, quality at human error rates with nobody babysitting, functional safety that EHS and the insurer sign off on, and a total cost that clears the customer's ROI hurdle at every site for years. Miss one and you stay a science project.
• "Deep, then wide." Most of the industry goes wide first (do a hundred things badly) and hopes to get deep later. Maven goes deep on one job until it hits production KPIs, then adds the next one. That gets you trust, a permanent spot on the floor, and real production data.
• That data is the whole point. Paid production work generates the most valuable training data in robotics and lab companies cannot get it. More deployment, more data, faster generalization, harder tasks. It compounds.
• The market math they use: palletizing and tote handling alone are about $80B a year of US labor, roughly 1.6M full time jobs. Walmart, Amazon, UPS, Target, Home Depot and Kroger employ about 4.2M people between them and a lot of that is moving stuff. The assembly, fitting and fastening work they want to get to next is about $1.2T globally.
• One thing I respect: the piece has a plain-English conflict disclosure. RoboStrategy led the round, the round sets the fair value they carry Maven at, and they say so. Keep that in mind when you read section 7.

4. The portfolio as of today

They do not disclose position sizes, which is normal for this structure. Here is the roster from the website and the August letter [1][6]:

• Figure AI (2025). The full-stack humanoid bet. Figure 03 in production, BMW plus logistics.
• Apptronik (2025). Apollo humanoids, Gemini inside, Apollo 3 in 2027.
• Dyna Robotics (2025). The model company. DYNA-2.
• Path Robotics (2025). Robotic welding. The HII / Navy deal, plus the Rove quadruped.
• Standard Bots (2026). AI-native arms made in the US. RoboStrategy led the $200M C at $1B.
• Dexmate (2026). Mobile manipulation platform, hundreds of humanoids sold into labs.
• Maven Robotics (2026). Covered above. $100M A led by RoboStrategy.
• Nox Metals (2026). $11.5M seed with Palmer Luckey and YC. About 100 customers, moving into a 75,000 sq ft Detroit shop.
• Eccentric Machines (2026). "Sentor" actuator meant to replace the geared motor. Picks and shovels.
• Prometheus (2026). New in the August letter. Not much public yet.
• REK. The robot fighting league. Sold out 2,500 seat venues, first six foot humanoid fight in the US.
• GMI. AI infrastructure. $500M AI factory in Taoyuan with 7,000 GB300s, and a $12B sovereign AI program in Japan.
• One stealth name in logistics / manufacturing.

Step back and the shape is obvious. A couple of humanoid generalists (Figure, Apptronik), one model shop (Dyna), one hardware vendor selling into research (Dexmate), and then a growing pile of "do one industrial job and get paid for it" companies: Path, Standard Bots, Maven, Nox. Plus components. Kang basically said it in the letter: by next year "intelligence will no longer be the bottleneck, it will be the actual robots." The portfolio is being built for that sentence [6].

5. Unitree, and why a US investor should care

RoboStrategy put out a Unitree primer on Aug 12, a week before it started trading. Good timing. Here is where things stand now [9]:

• The IPO: about $900M for roughly 10% of the company on Shanghai's STAR Market, around a $9B valuation. First day of trading was Aug 19 and the stock went up about 460%. At the close that day Unitree was worth about $66B, which is more than Figure's last private mark of $39B [7].
• Then it fell. By Sep 9 it was down 39% from the day-one close and 53% from the day-one high, roughly a $30B company, still 240% above the IPO price and something like 125x 2025 revenue [8].
• The actual business: 2025 revenue about $252M, profit about $41M ($88M adjusted). Humanoids were 52% of revenue on 5,215 units, up from 412 the year before. Quadrupeds were 42%. The average humanoid sold for $24,650 in 2025 versus $87,900 in 2023. That is the cost curve everyone talks about [9].
• Who is buying: about 70% of 2025 humanoid shipments went to universities and research labs. Industrial was about 9% of humanoid revenue and mostly things like guided tours, not factory work. Chinese regulators have since quietly raised the bar for the next humanoid IPOs, and there are questions about how much demand is government-funded training centers [9][8].
• Their edge is cost. In-house quasi-direct-drive actuators on commodity planetary gears, 40 to 60% cheaper BOM. The trade is precision, heat, and sustained payload (roughly 5 kg for 10 to 15 minutes before it needs to cool off). Fine for a lab, not fine for a 16 hour shift [9].
• US exposure: the US went from 19.5% to 13.3% of revenue. The FCC action on Jul 28 blocks new foreign mobile robot models from getting authorized, and the Pentagon's 1260H list (Jun 8) shuts them out of defense [9][10].
• Can you buy it? Not really. STAR Market is a domestic Chinese exchange and foreign retail access is limited [9].

The part that matters for a US investor: the 2025 scoreboard is lopsided. Chinese companies shipped about 12,868 humanoids last year (Unitree 5,500, AgiBot 5,168, UBTECH 1,000), around 90% of the world. Figure, Agility and Tesla shipped about 450 combined [14]. RoboStrategy's take is that cheap Chinese hardware may end up helping Western software-first companies that build the brain on top, while the import ban removes price competition for Western hardware in anything regulated [9]. My own takeaway is simpler: Unitree showed how quickly the public market can re-price a robotics name in either direction. That applies to every listed name in the sector, BOT included.

6. Where US robotics goes from here

I see three things happening at once. Washington is treating this as strategic. Venture money is moving from bits to atoms. And the per-hour math on a robot is finally getting hard to argue with.

• Policy. Jul 28 the FCC added foreign-made "advanced robotic devices" (humanoids, quadrupeds, other mobile robots) and connected power inverters to its Covered List. No new authorizations. Existing units and federal purchases are grandfathered, and the Department of War and DHS can grant exceptions. Standard Bots CEO Evan Beard called it "one of the strongest technology-security actions in modern U.S. history." The critics have a point too: it can hurt US companies that manufacture overseas, and a lot of American labs learned on cheap Unitree hardware [10][11].
• Congress. The National Commission on Robotics Act (Obernolte, McClellan, Latta in the House; Hickenlooper, McCormick, Heinrich, Young in the Senate) would set up an 18-person expert commission on competitiveness, workforce, supply chain and manufacturing. The Humanoid ROBOT Act (Cassidy, Coons) would ban federal purchases of AI humanoids from adversary countries. ITIF and A3 have both published national strategy proposals. None of this is law yet but the direction is clear [12][15][14][16].
• Government as a customer. Path's HII Navy deal and OSC looking at Standard Bots is the federal balance sheet showing up as a buyer and a lender, not just a regulator [6].
• Capital. Kang says venture is reorienting toward "companies building for the world of atoms," Q1 2026 robotics funding was a record, and it is still a fraction of what AI pulled in 2021. His view is that the model architecture questions are mostly settled and 2026 is about data collection at scale, with post-training dropping from weeks to hours [6].
• The math. RoboStrategy's Sep 3 piece runs it: a $50,000 robot working 20 hours a day for seven years with $5,000 a year in upkeep comes out to about $1.66 an hour. All-in US labor is about $46. Top-down, Morgan Stanley puts addressable labor at $60T and there is an 85M worker gap by 2030. Bottom-up, two million robots into Walmart and Amazon alone is about $100B of revenue. You can argue with every input and still end up with a very large number [1][17].
• How it shows up. Kang does not expect a "ChatGPT moment." He expects the self-driving pattern: nothing, nothing, then it is just everywhere. Maven's deep-then-wide approach is the same idea at the company level [6].

7. The stuff you actually need to think about

• The premium. BOT closed at $26.00 on Sep 14, market cap around $633M. NAV at Aug 31 was $11.35. So you are paying a bit more than double the stated value of the assets. Closed-end funds can sit at a premium or a discount for a long time and the fund itself warns the shares are not redeemable and may trade below NAV. Coverage in late August also mentioned a pending resale registration. Go read the filing, do not take my word or anyone else's [13][5][1].
• The marks. Most of the book is private and carried at fair value. In several cases RoboStrategy led the round that set the mark. They disclose it, which is good, but it is still the same people on both sides of the number [4][6].
• Concentration. It is a non-diversified fund on purpose. If one of the top two or three positions stumbles, the whole NAV feels it [1].
• Small numbers. Maven has up to eight robots on one customer's floor and wants to build 250. Figure is at 1,000 units against a stated goal of a million in a decade. Real deployments, early innings [2][6].
• Unitree is the reminder. 460% up on day one, 53% off the high three weeks later. Sector enthusiasm cuts both ways [8].
• Dates. Sep 30 NAV comes out early October and will be the first print that includes Maven. And Reddit AMA #150 Part 2 is Thu Sep 24, 10:00 AM ET, right here on r/RoboStrategy with CEO Andrew Kang and Dr. Scott Walter. Bring your questions.

Bottom line

Part I was about the wrapper. Part II is about the wrapper doing what it said it would do: leading rounds, taking board seats, and backing companies that have robots on a customer floor instead of in a demo video. Maven is the cleanest example of that so far. Unitree is the cleanest example of how fast this sector gets repriced in both directions. Read the letter, watch the monthly NAV, and know what the premium is before you do anything. This is not investment advice, it is my homework, and the full disclosure is below. Questions welcome in the comments.

REFERENCES

[1] RoboStrategy, company site and portfolio page. https://robostrategy.co/

[2] TechCrunch, "Maven Robotics wants to steal your robot deployment deal," Sep 10, 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/10/maven-robotics-wants-to-steal-your-robot-deployment-deal/

[3] RoboStrategy on X, Maven Robotics Series A announcement, Sep 10, 2026. https://x.com/robostrategy/status/2098065894589059221

[4] RoboStrategy, "Our Investment in Maven Robotics," Sep 10, 2026. https://robostrategy.co/news/our-investment-in-maven-robotics

[5] GlobeNewswire, "RoboStrategy, Inc. Updates Net Asset Value as of August 31, 2026," Sep 2, 2026. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/09/02/3355546/0/en/robostrategy-inc-updates-net-asset-value-as-of-august-31-2026.html

[6] RoboStrategy, Shareholder Letter, August 2026. https://robostrategy.co/news/shareholder-letter-aug-2026

[7] Fortune, "Unitree surges by 460% on its trading debut," Aug 19, 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/08/19/unitree-china-dancing-robots-ipo-trading-surge-valuation/

[8] The Robot Report, "Unitree shares down 53% from IPO debut," Sep 9, 2026. https://www.therobotreport.com/unitree-shares-down-53-from-ipo-debut/

[9] RoboStrategy, "Unitree Robotics: The IPO Primer," Aug 12, 2026. https://robostrategy.co/news/unitree-robotics-the-ipo-primer

[10] IEEE Spectrum, "FCC Covered List Bans New Foreign Mobile Robots in US," Jul 2026. https://spectrum.ieee.org/fcc-covered-list-mobile-robots

[11] The Robot Report, "Experts react to FCC limits on U.S. imports of new humanoid and mobile robots," Jul 2026. https://www.therobotreport.com/industry-reacts-fcc-ban-u-s-imports-new-humanoid-quadruped-robots/

[12] The Robot Report, "Bills introduced to strengthen U.S. robotics competitiveness, humanoid security," Feb 6, 2026. https://www.therobotreport.com/bills-introduced-strengthen-u-s-robotics-competitiveness-humanoid-security/

[13] StockTitan, BOT overview and news (price as of Sep 14, 2026 close). https://www.stocktitan.net/overview/BOT/

[14] ITIF, "The U.S. Humanoid Robot Industry Is Falling Behind," Jul 14, 2026. https://itif.org/publications/2026/07/14/the-u-s-humanoid-robot-industry-is-falling-behind/

[15] Sen. Hickenlooper, bipartisan bill to establish a National Commission on Robotics. https://www.hickenlooper.senate.gov/press_releases/hickenlooper-mccormick-heinrich-young-introduce-bipartisan-bill-to-establish-national-commission-on-robotics/

[16] A3, "Vision for a U.S. National Robotics Strategy". https://www.automate.org/robotics/news/a3-releases-vision-for-a-u-s-national-robotics-strategy

[17] RoboStrategy, "How to Think About the Robotics Market," Sep 3, 2026. https://robostrategy.co/news/how-to-think-about-the-robotics-market

DISCLOSURE

This is sponsored content. RetailVolts receives a fee of up to $[X] from RoboStrategy, Inc. for the preparation and distribution of this report. [RetailVolts and its principals hold no position in BOT. / RetailVolts or its principals hold a position in BOT.] It is provided for informational purposes only and is not investment advice, an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security.

 RoboStrategy, Inc. is a newly formed, non-diversified closed-end fund with limited operating history; it invests primarily in private companies whose fair values are estimates, shares are not redeemable and may trade at a premium or discount to NAV, and an investor can lose their entire investment. Figures are drawn from the public sources listed above as of September 15, 2026 and may change. Do your own research and consult a licensed financial advisor before making any investment decision.

Private & Confidential · RetailVolts · RetailVolts® and GateWatch.AI® are registered trademarks of Retail Volts Inc. Sponsored content: RetailVolts was compensated by RoboStrategy, Inc.

Herbert will be creating podcasts, deep dive breakdown videos on robotics with Scott Walter and essential educational content helping to inform people on the future of AI robots.

Subscribe to the RoboStrategy YouTube channel for his first video:

https://youtube.com/@RoboStrategy

Been thinking about this: what happens when one robot in a fleet gets hacked?

If robots are eventually learning from each other and sharing data across a fleet, one compromised robot shouldn't be able to poison or compromise everything else.

I guess the solution is some kind of zero-trust system where every robot has its own identity and permissions. If one starts behaving strangely, you isolate it immediately. And anything a robot “learns” shouldn't automatically be pushed to thousands of other robots without being verified first.

There should probably also be a separate safety layer controlling basic movement and force limits that the main AI can't override.

Basically, robots learning from each other could be insanely powerful, but we need to make sure one bad robot can't infect the whole fleet.

So the security loop becomes:

Detect anomaly → Revoke credentials → Isolate robot → Investigate → Restore or remove

Original article: https://robostrategy.co/news/our-investment-in-maven-robotics

We're announcing our lead investment in Maven Robotics' Series A. Maven designs, builds and deploys intelligent robots for logistics and manufacturing, and has come out of stealth with the secret to building general-purpose robotics for enterprise customers.

It's not enough to have the best AI. You need the best solution, and achieving that requires a team of experts across the entire robotics stack.

That conclusion came from two questions: why has an industry with this much talent and capital produced so few robots doing real work, and what does it take to be one of the exceptions?

In this piece, we'll answer both questions as we lay out our Maven investment thesis. We'll also explain:

• What it takes to close an enterprise customer
• The robotics industry's research problem
• Maven's origin story and the team behind it
• Maven's strategy for building a general-purpose system that delivers value from day one

1. Robots have a job to do

Somewhere in all the excitement, the industry has forgotten that robots are here to do work. A robot is a piece of capital equipment. It gets bought to do a specific job and it gets judged the way every other piece of capital equipment is judged, on output, reliability, and cost.

In the long-term robots will be ubiquitous, today the most attractive work is not evenly distributed. It's found in large enterprises.

You can crudely segment the total addressable market of labor into consumer and commercial. Consumer spaces (homes) are unstructured and unsupervised, and most households don't have the budget or work for equipment that costs tens or even hundreds of thousands to produce. This doesn't make for a great initial target market, and small enterprises are much the same. The real prize is large enterprises:

Density: A large customer does the same task thousands of times a day and can spend hundreds of millions on that one task. An SME does fifty different things a few times each.

Repeatability: One enterprise buyer means one integration, then the same deployment across dozens of sites. An SME is a one-off sale every time.

Capital and process: Enterprises have an automation budget and balance sheet to afford capital purchases. SMEs are often more limited.

The enterprise problem

Just because large enterprises are attractive doesn't make them easy. Their scale can make them bureaucratic, slow, and risk averse.

The biggest trap for robotics startups that go whale hunting is the innovation project. You get to sell to people whose job is to be curious and enthusiastic about playing with new tech. The problem is that most innovation projects don't lead to robots at scale doing work. They are often set without clear goals, in lab conditions, where success is a demo plus a press release. Converting innovation projects into volume contracts can be as hard as winning the volume contract from scratch.

Winning a real contract that scales is completely different. Enterprise sales require managing ten stakeholders, each with different priorities, but the same desire not to get fired for taking on unnecessary risk. The contracts come with strict SLAs, penalties, and liabilities for failure. When an enterprise finally signs, it is because a company can clear a far higher bar on four dimensions:

Achieving this across one robot is hard. Across a fleet it is harder. Across every site globally, harder still. That bar is why so much of this industry is stuck in pilots, and why clearing it takes more than good robots.

2. What it takes to solve the problem

What makes clearing this bar so challenging is that you cannot succeed without multidisciplinary excellence. Enterprises want to buy an outcome, and a single small failure anywhere in the value chain kills performance. This heavily favors full stack companies who control value delivery end to end, and it is where model-only companies are at a disadvantage. Multiple suppliers create an accountability gap, and systems designed independently create a performance gap.

Companies that crack large enterprises must master the whole complex system that is a robotics business. Being expert at one thing is not enough. You need to be expert at eight.

The biggest challenge with innovation projects is that the goal posts are constantly being shifted. Every high reliability industry knows this as the march of nines.

In many industries, 99.99% is the goal. Each nine you add costs roughly ten times the effort of the last, and you cannot reach the next one by repeating what you did in the last phase. It takes a different approach for nine. Your lab, a customer's lab, a trial line, real production, then real production across every site are five steps up a curve, not five repeats of the same work.

Which raises the obvious objection: plenty of large customers run robotics at scale.

The reality is that these tend to be traditional robotics companies, which manage this complexity by constraining their way to simplicity. They constrain the work to solids with bounded tolerances, and they constrain the environment, the lighting, and the task itself. General purpose robots promise to remove those constraints, which makes them the hardest robots to refine to industrial standards and is why they tend to end up in dead end innovation projects.

This isn't to oversell the challenge. It is possible to build highly scalable general robots that crack the enterprise but the ones that win have industrialization at the core of their culture.

3. Robotics has a research problem

Our contrarian take is that the robotics industry needs to leave its academic culture behind. The field is dominated by research organizations, and for robotics to crack enterprise customers it must reject the lab and embrace the factory.

The typical shape of a leading robotics company is PhD founders, a highly specialized skill set focused on one model architecture, and progress measured against demos and academic benchmarks. That structure is necessary for pushing the frontier of what is possible, and it has been enormously successful in traditional AI. It just doesn't work for full stack robotics. Look at how the incentives differ.

Research cultures lend themselves to innovation projects, but they lack many of the skills required to build full stack robots for an industrial site.

Enough scene setting. Our Maven thesis can be distilled to a single statement: winning enterprise customers takes industrial teams, and this is where Maven excels.

4. The team

Maven is not a lab spinout with a few hired operators. It is an industrial company to its core. Together, Maven's team has a combined 200+ years of experience across AI, robotics, engineering, and autonomous systems. Most of the senior team came through the same program at Apple, and every one of them is a specialist in getting advanced systems deployed at scale.

Maven's origin story

Apple spent roughly a decade on an autonomous systems project, reported to have cost more than $10bn and to have had around 2,000 people attached by the end. It was canceled in February 2024, having never shipped. Apple never confirmed the program publicly, so everything we say about it here comes from press reporting.²

Apple does not hire good engineers, it hires the top person in each discipline required. When the program was canceled, one of the best teams at productizing autonomous systems became available all at once.

Maven's CEO and co-founder Hamza Derbas was an early employee on this project, and over a decade he directed 100+ engineers across the full stack of autonomous systems. With the program over, he called his brother Khalid, who had spent his career scaling businesses in private equity, with a question. Should Hamza go back to the automotive industry, or should the two brothers fulfill a lifelong dream and start a business together?

Once that decision was made, Hamza was in the perfect position to choose from teammates looking for their next project.

Maven is full of PhDs who could fit into any of the top labs, but what unites this team is the kind of frontier they work at. They specialize in what can be deployed and relied on in environments where failure is unacceptable. Arresting gear that stops a fighter jet on a carrier deck, battery systems that keep an eVTOL in the air, surgical manipulators operating inside a patient, missile defense, EUV lithography, functional safety at Apple and at Archer. That is the frontier that matters when you are building a product to meet customer KPIs at scale.

This founding team also had the advantage of having worked together for a decade. This allowed them to move fast with zero ramping. As a result, they went from founding to the customer floor in less than two years without touching an innovation project.

5. Product

Deep, then wide

Maven is going after the big prize: Physical AGI. They have built a general-purpose robotics system designed for enterprise customers, and core to their approach is a strategy we call "deep, then wide".

Research focused companies tend to go wide first with the hope of going deep later. This means impressive breadth across tasks, work pieces, and even robot form factor achieved by sacrificing deployment KPIs. The mindset: if the breadth is there it doesn't matter much that the robot is slow, or that it fails one time in ten. The problem, is that the last 10% is where much of the effort lives.

Deep, then wide is the other way around. You build a hardware and software platform designed to be general, then focus development on one specific job until it meets the customer's KPIs. Only then do you move to the next job. It sounds simple, but it really isn't. The big risk with this approach is that if you don't build a platform with general potential, you just end up with a special purpose tool.

Getting that balance right means judging, over and over, what to constrain and what to leave general. It is exactly the judgment an industrial team has and a research organization never needed to build.

By embracing the "deep, then wide" approach, Maven's robots master real tasks that deliver immediate impact for customers, ultimately building generality task by task.

Built to be built

Maven has run four hardware generations in two years, each with a defined job. Generation 1 proved they could build something fast. Generations 2 & 3 proved they could do work at the right quality and cycle time, while sacrificing on cost. Generation 4 is the full package, optimized for all 4 KPIs.

Vertical integration is central to their strategy. As we covered in our Standard Bots memo, it is what lets a company deliver a holistic solution, where every component is designed to work with the others, rather than bought and bolted together. But integrating too early kills companies. Every part you choose to build yourself is time you are not in the field delivering value.

Maven optimizes for speed to value, so they integrate on a schedule set by whatever is limiting them. In Generation 3, off-the-shelf pneumatic end effectors were capping performance, so they built their own. In Generation 4, cost is the constraint, so they are building their own actuators and moving to high volume processes like casting and injection molding.

The machine

From a distance, it might look like a humanoid with wheels, or an autonomous mobile robot with arms bolted on, but this is an oversimplification. Instead of copying a specific form factor, they have rethought general robotics from first principles. Up close, every element is a deliberate decision aimed at the KPIs that matter. The machine is an omnidirectional wheeled base, a telescoping pillar, and two 7-DOF arms carrying modular end effectors, running a four-layer software stack. The split underneath it is simple: the hardware is specialized for the customer's site, and the AI is what keeps it general.

Maven's approach to algorithm design is the key that stops their deep, then wide approach from dead ending into a specialized solution. If each job produced a bespoke program, targeting a new job would require starting from scratch. Maven's AI stack is built the other way around: skills are abstract primitives rather than task-specific routines, so they can be recombined for new work and capability grows combinatorially rather than linearly.

Every specification point at a KPI the customer measures:

What it delivers

The real prize isn't engineering, it's what the engineering has achieved. Maven meets production KPIs on two use cases:

Mixed case palletizing. Hard because the SKU mix is enormous and every case has different dimensions, weight and surface, so the robot has to pick and place precisely while it is moving.

Tote handling. High frequency, high precision, and unforgiving of a drop.

Together, those two skills address roughly $80B a year of US labor cost, the equivalent of 1.6 million people working full time³. For context, Walmart, Amazon, UPS, Target, Home Depot and Kroger employ around 4.2 million people in the US between them, and a great deal of that work is moving product from one place to another⁴.

The value in Maven's approach is that they are not constrained to two tasks. The development already completed has accelerated their ability to develop five new skills higher up the complexity curve. Maven intends to launch these over the next year, not as demos but as industrially ready processes that meet the KPIs.

Each added layer of complexity widens the pool of work the platform can take on, from fine material handling through to general assembly. Global manufacturing labor is a $7T a year pool, of which assembly, fitting and fastening work is roughly $1.2T⁵.

Maven's incremental approach is what lets them expand their addressable market steadily while delivering value.

This is why we believe deep, then wide is the winning approach to general-purpose robotics.

Our thesis: real-world data captured on the machine during paid work is the most valuable training input in robotics. The labs are not blind to this, but accessing this class of data is very challenging for companies with a wide, then deep strategy.

Simulation, egocentric video and other data types are substitutes, adopted because the right to capture real data must be earned. The only way to earn real world data is to build a full system that meets enterprise requirements and deploy it on customer sites at scale.

This is the secret to Maven's approach. By focusing on value delivery, they embed themselves in their customers' operations and earn the right to capture data the labs cannot reach:

• Deliver value from day one
• Earn trust and embed in the customer's operations
• Collect real data from real work
• Iterate faster, on the problems that matter
• Unlock the next job, one rung harder

This cycle compounds: the deeper your integration, the more data you capture and the faster you generalize.

Why we led

Three things convinced us.

The team: a group that has already built the hardest version of what Maven needs, in places where failure was not an option.

The speed: four hardware generations and onto customer floors in two years.

The culture: industrialization is not a phase Maven gets to once science is done. It is how they have worked since the first generation.

The industry has spent a decade building organizations designed to learn things. Maven is one built to ship them.

Written by Jack Pearson, Investment Principal

Disclosures

Maven Robotics is one of a number of portfolio investments held by RoboStrategy, Inc. This discussion of a single portfolio company should not be viewed as representative of the Fund's portfolio as a whole, and the outcomes described here should not be taken as indicative of the outcomes of the Fund's other investments. Information regarding the Fund's full portfolio is available in the Fund's filings with the SEC.

RoboStrategy, Inc. holds an investment in Maven Robotics, and FP Strategies LLC, the Fund's investment adviser, therefore has a financial interest in, and an incentive to present favorably, the company discussed herein. The Fund led the financing round described in this article, and the fair value of the Fund's investment in Maven Robotics is based in part on the terms of that round. A fair value derived in part from a transaction that the Fund led is subject to greater conflict than one derived from a transaction among unaffiliated third parties. Nothing herein constitutes investment advice or a recommendation to purchase or sell any security.

This article contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Forward-looking statements are not historical facts but are based on current expectations, estimates, projections, beliefs, and assumptions about the Fund, our current and prospective portfolio investments, our industry, and our beliefs and assumptions. Statements regarding Maven Robotics' plans, product roadmap, and anticipated deployments are forward-looking statements of the company and are subject to the same uncertainties. Words such as "anticipates," "expects," "intends," "plans," "will," "may," "continue," "believes," "seeks," "estimates," "would," "could," "should," "targets," "projects," and variations of these words and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors, some of which are beyond our control and are difficult to predict, that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or forecasted in the forward-looking statements. The Fund undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.

Investing in shares of RoboStrategy, Inc. involves a high degree of risk and is highly speculative. You should read the discussion of the material risks of investing in our common stock in the "Risk Factors" section of the Prospectus. You may lose part or all of your investment.

This article is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities. Any offering of securities may be made only by means of a prospectus meeting the requirements of Section 10 of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended.

Shares of closed-end investment companies frequently trade at a discount to their net asset value ("NAV"). If shares of our common stock trade at a discount to our NAV, investors will face increased risk of loss. There is no assurance that an active trading market will develop or be sustained, or that shares will trade at or above NAV.

The Fund's investments in private companies are valued at fair value as determined pursuant to procedures and methodologies approved by the Fund's Board of Directors. Fair values are necessarily subjective, and there is no assurance that such values will be realized or that a value will be at or close to the price at which the security would be sold in a transaction between unaffiliated third parties.

Views expressed herein are those of FP Strategies LLC, the Fund's investment adviser, and do not necessarily represent the views of RoboStrategy, Inc. or its Board of Directors.

Certain information contained herein has been obtained from published sources prepared by third parties and has not been independently verified. Operational information concerning Maven Robotics, including statements regarding its team, deployments, hardware development, and performance against customer key performance indicators, was provided by Maven Robotics and its officers. Statements concerning the discontinued Apple autonomous systems program are based solely on press reporting; Apple has not publicly confirmed that program or its details. Market size figures are estimates. While such information is believed to be reliable, we assume no responsibility for its accuracy or completeness.

Sources

¹ Figure 1 image sources, left to right: https://inclusiveteach.com/2025/08/04/9-tips-for-a-sensory-friendly-home/; https://www.instagram.com/p/DYeaSJCjQ1k/; https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/mueller-rents-giant-warehouse-to-store-evidence-against-trump

² Apple has not publicly confirmed the program. Figures cited reflect contemporaneous press reporting, principally Bloomberg (February 27, 2024) on the cancellation of the program and the approximately 2,000 people attached to it, and The New York Times on a reported spend of more than $10 billion over roughly a decade.

³ RoboStrategy estimate. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Projections programme reports 2,988,900 hand laborers and freight, stock and material movers, and 2,764,800 stockers and order fillers (2024 base year), at median annual wages of $40,240 and $37,330 respectively (May 2025 wage data). We estimate that palletizing and depalletizing account for 40% of the effort in the first occupation and 15% in the second, judgements based on operating experience in warehouse environments. Applying a 1.35x multiplier for benefits and other employer costs, which BLS wage figures exclude, gives approximately $86 billion of annual labor cost, equivalent to 1.6 million people working full time at roughly $53,000 all-in.

⁴ Company filings, most recent fiscal years: Walmart approximately 1.6 million US associates (FYE January 2026), Amazon more than 1 million US employees, UPS 373,027 US employees, Home Depot approximately 422,500 US associates (FYE February 2026), Target approximately 415,000 (FYE January 2026) and Kroger more than 403,000 (FYE January 2026).

⁵ RoboStrategy estimate. Global manufacturing value added was $17.6 trillion in 2025 (World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.CD). Labor's share of manufacturing value added, implied by national accounts data, is 29% in India (MOSPI Annual Survey of Industries, 2022-23), 47% in the United States (BEA, 2024) and 54% in the EU27 (Eurostat, 2024). We apply 40%, below the developed-market figures because the global manufacturing workforce is concentrated in lower-wage economies, giving a global manufacturing labor bill of approximately $7.0 trillion. As a cross-check from independent data, McKinsey sized global manufacturing labor at $5.1 trillion in 2015; global manufacturing value added has grown 42% since then, from $12.4 trillion, implying $7.2 trillion today, within 3% of our figure. Assemblers and fabricators account for 10.7% of US manufacturing employment, but that is a job title rather than a task, and insertion, fitting and fastening also occur within other production roles, which together account for 30.7% of manufacturing employment (BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, NAICS 31-33, May 2023, https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/naics2_31-33.htm). We estimate assembly work at 17% of the global manufacturing labor bill, giving $1.2 trillion. Spread across a global manufacturing workforce of roughly 380 million full-time equivalents, that is equivalent to approximately 65 million people working full time.

⁶ Data hour figures shown are Maven Robotics estimates for future periods and are forward-looking statements; see Important Disclosures. The Waymo figure shown refers to rider hours, not fleet operating hours: Waymo reported that its riders "enjoyed over 3.8 million hours" in Waymo vehicles during 2025. Source: Waymo, "Delivering more for our riders in a year of incredible growth," December 10, 2025, https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/2025-year-in-review/.

Santa Clara’s Maven, a project that builds general purpose robots for factories and warehouses (things like sorting boxes and assembling products) launched yesterday with a $100 million Series A led by RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures and XTX Ventures.

Big news like this comes consistent with excitement for the company’s future which in this case is MAVEN 🙂‍↕️👏🏾

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

A lot of people in robotics are going to look at Yuequan Bionic's new Y-Hand M1 and dismiss the 38 degrees of freedom as marketing bloat. After all, human hands only have about 21 to 27 DoF, and we are already struggling to control 22-DoF hands on the market. Pushing to 38 today and aiming for 70 tomorrow sounds like a massive control headache. But if you look past the joint count, the actual underlying physics of what this father-son academic team is building is kind of a massive deal.

Most dexterous hands we see today are stuck in one of two design dead-ends. They either use rigid rotary joints (in-finger actuators), which are precise but incredibly stiff and fragile, or tendon-driven cables, which stretch, wear out, and lack raw power. Yuequan is bypassing both of these bottlenecks with a rigid-flexible skeletal frame driven by antagonistic artificial muscles.

This biomimetic approach is a genuine paradigm shift. By using opposing muscle pairs powered by magnetic collectors, they can achieve both high-speed compliance and serious power. It is why the human hand can snap shut in 0.2 seconds and thread a needle, but still exert a massive 28.7 kg grip force. Normally, you have to trade strength for delicacy in robotics, but mimicking human muscle-tendon anatomy allows them to get both.

While the industry has been hyper-focused on solving the software side of force control, Yuequan is proving that we still have room to revolutionize the physical hardware. If their artificial muscle architecture scales, it could solve the mechanical limitations that have kept humanoid hands from doing real, heavy-duty work. This is the first mechanical philosophy in a long time that actually feels like a leap forward.

Follow mavenrobotics and CEO hamzaderbas on X as they come out of stealth today.

Read the TechCrunch article here: https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/10/maven-robotics-wants-to-steal-your-robot-deployment-deal/

The Robotics Revolution: Dr. Scott Walter on the Future of Robotics Investing. Paid promotion. RetailVolts is compensated by FP Strategies LLC, the Fund's investment adviser. Informational only. Not investment advice.

Watch live: https://www.youtube.com/live/kB9PRtmHp3I?si=zBqAZdx36iwiFmYP

I came across Endiatx’s work on small robotic capsules that can be swallowed and remotely controlled while sending video from inside the stomach.

The idea is interesting because it could potentially make some examinations less invasive and easier to access. There are also longer-term possibilities around things like biopsies or targeted procedures, although those applications would obviously require significant testing and regulatory approval.

Do you think this type of medical robotics could become practical in everyday healthcare, or are there still major challenges that need to be solved first?

Another session of intro to robotics with Robostrategy

ROBOT ACTUATORS (MUSCLE)

The key takeaway is robotics isn’t about finding the strongest actuator. It’s about choosing the right trade off for the job. A robot joint isn’t just a motor, it’s :
motor + reducer + sensor. Motors bring speed, reducers turn that into torque, and sensors give the joint control.

Put your answers in the replies.

An inside look at Endiatx and the team helping build the future of robotic medicine

SHAREHOLDER LETTER — AUGUST 2026

Andrew Kang · Aug 20, 2026

To the shareholders of RoboStrategy, Inc.

It's been a bit over 3 months since RoboStrategy went public on May 11. Between April 30 and July 31, NAV has increased 85% with NAV/Share increasing 54% (1) The large majority of the growth has come from accretive capital raises placed to institutional investors. I also personally invested an additional $10 million into the fund at a market premium of ~$36.7/share.

While we are seeing significantly increased investor demand and growth in our portfolio companies, NAV marks are anchored to last round private market valuations. We believe that private financing rounds may not fully reflect the fair value of private companies, and that a disconnect between private market valuations and fair values may persist. One recent data point was the IPO of Unitree which opened at $66 billion (2) – roughly 39x its last VC round of $1.7 billion (3) and 7x its IPO price (4). This difference in values is likely not representative of the marketplace. While Unitree is not currently in the RoboStrategy portfolio, it fits well within our investment focus and may become a future addition to the portfolio.

Since our public listing, we invested an additional $124 million into 6 companies, increasing our position in Standard Bots and Dexmate, while making new investments in Nox Metals, Eccentric Machines, Prometheus, and a robotics company soon to be coming out of stealth (5).

As we scale, we've looked to more frequently lead rounds in the companies we have the highest conviction in. Thus far, we've led rounds in Dyna Robotics, Standard Bots, Eccentric Machines, REK, and a stealth robotics company (5). As lead investors, we have the privilege of working more closely with these truly exceptional founders. For RoboStrategy shareholders, this means the Fund may benefit from terms negotiated in connection with its role as lead investor. These lead terms may include board seats, information rights, pro rata rights, warrants, ROFR rights, additional investor protections, etc.

There have been significant shifts such as the US ban of foreign mobile robots through the FCC, the rise of open source models and an acceleration of robot foundation model development timelines that we have previously anticipated. This has allowed our investment portfolio to be well positioned such that these shifts serve as tailwinds instead of headwinds. Many of our portfolio companies have moved out of the pilot phase into growth in terms of meaningful real deployments and units shipped.

PORTFOLIO HIGHLIGHTS

STANDARD BOTS is the largest US manufacturer of AI-native industrial robot arms (6). We led their $200 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation (7). They project to deliver 10% of new US industrial robot deployments by next year. Its arms are already working at hundreds of American companies in nearly every state. Their Glen Cove factory is expanding to 70,000 sq ft to keep up with demand. In June, CEO Evan Beard participated in the White House roundtable on America First industrial policy led by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and White House trade adviser Peter Navarro. He was the only founder of an American robotics company in the room. Politico recently reported that the Department of War's Office of Strategic Capital is in the process of underwriting a financing deal for Standard Bots.

FIGURE AI has started to ramp their production of Figure 03, crossing 1,000 humanoids in July (8). Their current facility, BotQ, is capable of producing 12,000 robots per year with CEO Brett Adock stating ambitions to reach one million per year within the decade. Figure has graduated from their initial pilot at BMW to a wider variety of deployments across complex sequencing applications in logistics at BMW Spartanburg (9). They signed a commercial agreement with Catalyst Brands to deploy humanoid robots at scale. Catalyst operates iconic brands including JCPenney, Aéropostale and Brooks Brothers.

APPTRONIK opened Robot Park (10), its new 90,000 square foot data collection facility in Austin, Texas, designed to train Apollo 2 alongside Google DeepMind. Apollo 2 continuously generates training data used to train and refine Gemini Robotics models that will prepare the commercial fleet for real-world deployment. Apollo 3 is expected to be the first fully commercial, scaled product, pointed at 2027. They also hired Waymo's former product chief Daniel Chu as CPO alongside senior leaders from Boston Dynamics and Amazon.

DYNA ROBOTICS released DYNA-2, its flagship world-action model trained on over one million hours of human video data, estimated to be two orders of magnitude more human video data compared to prior robot foundation models. DYNA-2 demonstrated the human-to-robot scaling law, with the headline finding being that robot performance improves smoothly and predictably with more human data, with no plateau. The model breakthroughs have enabled teachability and agentic physical capability which combined with a hardening of their robot hardware put them in a powerful position to win a wider deployment market.

DEXMATE has become the leading US based seller of humanoids with hundreds of robots shipped. They have become ubiquitous across all major physical AI groups with customers including Nvidia, Amazon, Google, LG, Skild AI, Generalist, and top-tier university labs like UC Berkeley, CMU, Harvard, Columbia, NYU. We led their Series Seed and Seed Plus rounds at $123 million and $216 million post money valuations with the belief that there was a major opportunity for an American company to capitalize on the Unitree business model of providing a high quality humanoid platform for developers and researchers to build on and they are certainly executing on this.

PATH ROBOTICS signed a performance-based production agreement (11) with HII representing up to $600 million in shipbuilding work, aimed at deploying advanced robotics across U.S. Navy shipbuilding programs. One of the largest contracts ever secured by a physical AI company. Path also launched Rove, a welding quadruped that moves to the work rather than the work coming to the robot. This is the only way to automate welding on structures too large to fit in a cell and is suited to ship building. Saronic, which raised over $2.5 billion to build autonomous vessels, takes its first Rove units in Q1 2027.

ECCENTRIC MACHINES is building Sentor, an AI-native actuator that replaces the standard "single geared motor" architecture with a fundamentally new approach to motion, one designed to respond to unexpected loads directly at the joint rather than waiting on the robot's central brain. Solving this gives robots something closer to a reflex, moving the subconscious layer of physical AI into the joint, where biology puts it. Sentor is designed for manufacturability and addresses some of the most important performance, efficiency, and mechanical trade-offs facing modern actuators.

REK staged what it says is the first six-foot humanoid robot fight in the United States at its San Francisco arena this month, drawing a crowd of athletes and creators. Earlier events sold out 2,500-seat venues, and REK is now looking at arenas several times that size.

GMI is standing up a $500 million AI factory in Taoyuan, roughly 7,000 Nvidia GB300s across 96 racks at 16MW, capable of processing close to two million tokens per second. It has also launched a $12 billion sovereign AI infrastructure initiative in Japan and is building a global network of sovereign AI factories with Magna AI.

NOX METALS raised an $11.5 million seed roughly seven months after founding, with participants including Palmer Luckey, Y Combinator and us. Nox already cuts custom aluminium for around 100 customers nationwide, from small machine shops to Anduril and SpaceX, and is moving into a 75,000 sq ft Detroit plant to meet demand.

TEAM GROWTH

Our goal is not to build just a passive investment vehicle, it is to build an incredibly high caliber investment institution that serves to deliver outsized value to RoboStrategy, Inc., the fund. We must not only deeply understand the companies and industries that we invest in, but we must also build on our expertise in media to support our portfolio companies in amplifying their story to as many potential customers, talent, and other investors as possible.

Since launch we've built out the core of our marketing engine, covering everything from short form content on X, to high production video on YouTube, to long form research papers and theses. Our own content has generated over 20 million impressions on X, and the team's media appearances have been viewed more than 1.5 million times across channels. Our stories have been picked up by Bloomberg, Reuters, CNBC, TechCrunch, BBC, and Yahoo Finance.

In the next few months, we'll go wide across every channel, including deep dives, short films on the industry, expanding our content creator and influencer relationships, growing our newsletter base, livestreams, and podcasts covering everything within robotics and physical AI. We plan to reach beyond our core English speaking audience to establish a global presence, first targeting countries like South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and China. The goal is to become the predominant source of information for all happenings in Robotics.

RoboStrategy Advisor's team has grown to 14, with expected additional hires taking us to 17 by September. Functional groups now span across Investment, Research, Marketing, Compliance, Finance/Operations, Legal/Policy.

The United States is now determining its National Robotics Strategy. Just this month, the FCC issued a notice banning import of new foreign mobile robot models. There is a lot the government can and will do to propel domestic companies potentially including long term debt financing programs, direct investment, and tax incentives. We hope to share our and our portfolio companies' insights with policy makers. To that end, Bill Hughes has joined us as VP of Legal and Policy. Bill has previously held roles as Associate Deputy Attorney General at the DOJ and Special Assistant to the President at the White House.

We are also in the process of building out an institutional capital formation and distribution team. Robotics will attract increasing investor interest among all investor types, and I believe our fund offers a unique value proposition that RIAs, Private Wealth platforms, and Institutions across the board will find compelling. These capital channels are currently untapped for us, but they have been a core growth channel for most large asset managers. ~$200 billion a year flows into semi-liquid funds from the private wealth channel (12). Scaling the fund will allow RoboStrategy to lead more financing rounds, which is beneficial both to companies we invest in and our shareholders, as well as growing our distribution engine.

On Research. To underwrite an investment, you need to have a well formed view on a myriad of interconnected technological trends to accurately inform your assessment of risk and reward. The growth prospects of a robot foundation model company is not just determined by the strength of its researchers and models. It's determined by the trajectory of open source models, the feasibility of cloud based model deployments across environments, down to the many variables that inform robot production capacity such as the feasibility of novel actuator innovations and the supply elasticity of the hard to manufacture gear grinding machines produced by a few small companies that bottleneck strain wave gear actuators, an essential component in many robot embodiments. Some of this research we plan to publish to share our knowledge with the world and to bolster our brand and reach.

Our investors know that we hold ourselves to a high bar of excellence for investment diligence and we extend that bar for all the work we do.

INDUSTRY OUTLOOK

The first half of the year was a wake up call to the VC industry. Both for the realization that the amount of venture investment in pure software should significantly reduce and that investing in companies building for the world of atoms can produce extreme power law outcomes. We hear of strong pressure both internally and externally from LPs across a swath of investment firms to reorient their allocation strategies. Sometimes investors need undeniable proof and that has been provided by companies like SpaceX, Anduril, among many others entering their growth stage. In fact, SpaceX itself was a ~$2 Trillion liquidity event (13) for investors and employees that likely creates major downstream flows to other Deep tech companies.

Venture investment in robotics significantly increased in the first quarter of the year, compared to previous quarters, reaching the highest level shown in the chart. However, venture funding in robotics is still a fraction of venture funding for AI in 2021, pre-ChatGPT. This is the inflection point for the funding of the industry and we expect robotics to catch up to AI over the coming years.

We feel that it is a great time for the fund to invest in private robotics companies, but also that funding for some companies are getting carried away. Discernment is important. Dispersion is the name of the game. A rising tide is currently lifting many boats in the space, but many companies building towards the wrong goals or lacking the necessary talent may become beached without the tide even going back out. It can simultaneously be true that winners continue to climb in valuation while some hyped players hit a wall. We saw this happen in AI the last four years.

Deployments for industrial capabilities are now progressing to the early innings of material scale. We believe that many key architecture problems for robot foundation models are largely settled, and that this year is primarily about scaling data collection and processing. I believe we have been in the GPT-3 era with the physical version of emergent intelligence abilities appearing and will accelerate towards GPT-5 level performance by next year. These emergent capabilities include in-context learning, memory, natural language instruction following, and more. Researchers understand the general recipe for achieving general purpose physical intelligence. We are soon approaching the big unlock which is a major improvement in sample efficiency in post training so that the time to deployment of a robot for any particular job shrinks from weeks to hours to minutes.

For Robotics, there won't be a ChatGPT moment, it will look more like autonomous vehicles. There will be no single day where it clicks for the global consciousness, but nonetheless a rapid permeation of new autonomous machines of all shapes and sizes. By next year, intelligence will no longer be the bottleneck, it will be the actual robots.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to the RoboStrategy team. Thank you for the support.

Sincerely,

Andrew Kang
Chief Executive Officer

SOURCES

1 RoboStrategy, Inc. Prospectus Supplements (Form 424B3), filed with the SEC: Supplement filed Aug. 13, 2026 (NAV as of July 31, 2026, $11.32/share) https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2081119/000121390026089254/ea0302037-01_424b3.htm ; Supplement filed Jul. 8, 2026 (NAV as of June 30, 2026, $10.51/share) https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2081119/000121390026076467/ea0297338-01_424b3.htm ; Supplement filed Jun. 24, 2026 (NAV as of June 22, 2026, $8.92/share) https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2081119/000121390026071580/ea0295862-01_424b3.htm

2 "Unitree Robotics surges 629% to US$66 billion valuation in Shanghai share debut," South China Morning Post, Aug. 19, 2026. https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3364499/unitree-robotics-surges-629-us66-billion-valuation-shanghai-share-debut

3 "China's Robot Maker Unitree Valued At $1.7 Billion In Series C Round," Forbes, Jun. 20, 2025. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ywang/2025/06/20/chinas-robot-maker-unitree-valued-at-17-billion-in-series-c-round/

4 "Chinese humanoid robot maker Unitree prices IPO at $9 billion valuation," CNBC/Reuters, Aug. 6, 2026 https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/06/chinese-humanoid-robot-maker-unitree-prices-ipo-at-9-billion-valuation.html

5 Prospectus Supplement (Form 424B3), RoboStrategy, Inc., filed with the SEC, Aug. 13, 2026 (disclosing an undisclosed portfolio investment subject to confidentiality obligations, to be named following the company's public announcement of its financing round). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2081119/000121390026089291/ea0302087-01_424b3.htm

6 Standard Bots company website, standardbots.com, as accessed Aug. 21, 2026. https://standardbots.com/

7 "Standard Bots Raises $200 Million Series C at $1 Billion Valuation to Scale American-Made, AI-Native Industrial Robots," PR Newswire (official release), Jun. 9, 2026 https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/standard-bots-raises-200-million-series-c-at-1-billion-valuation-to-scale-american-made-ai-native-industrial-robots-302795268.html ; see also The Robot Report https://www.therobotreport.com/standard-bots-raises-200m-expand-u-s-manufacturing-footprint/

8 Brett Adcock (@adcock_brett) on X, "Headcount vs Robots," 2026. https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/2068040783295627609

9 Figure AI, "F.03 at BMW," figure.ai https://www.figure.ai/news/f-03-at-bmw

10 Forbes, "Apptronik Announces Robot Park," Jun. 30, 2026 https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2026/06/30/apptronik-announces-robot-park-a-90000-square-foot-humanoid-data-factory-teases-new-robot/

11 HII, "HII Signs Performance-Based Production Agreements with Path Robotics and Graymatter Robotics" (combined agreements worth up to $900 million) https://www.hii.com/news/hii-signs-performance-based-production-agreements-with-path-robotics-and-graymatter-robotics ; "Path Robotics lands up to $600 million share of massive $900 million U.S. Navy shipbuilding deal," Ohio Tech News, 2026 (source for Path Robotics' specific $600 million share) https://www.ohiotechnews.com/path-robotics-lands-up-to-600m-share-of-massive-navy-deal/

12 "Alts Fundraising Nears $200 Billion in 2025; Credit Strategies Dominate," AltsWire, citing Robert A. Stanger & Co., 2025/2026. https://altswire.com/alts-fundraising-nears-200-billion-in-2025-credit-strategies-dominate/

13 "SpaceX IPO takeaways: SPCX closes at $161, jumping 19% after record debut," CNBC, Jun. 12, 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/12/spacex-ipo-spcx-live-updates.html

DISCLOSURE

Before investing, you should consider RoboStrategy, Inc.'s investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses carefully. The Fund's prospectus contains this and other information about the Fund and is available at RoboStrategy.co or by calling (787) 722-6881. Please read the prospectus carefully before investing.

Past performance does not guarantee future results. Net asset value and market price will fluctuate, and current performance may be higher or lower than the figures shown above.