Standard Bots has announced a $200 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation. The company says it is the largest manufacturer of native artificial intelligence industrial robots in the United States.
Standard Bots
Robots are the bad guys when it comes to jobs, right? But Standard Bots, which today announced a $200 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation, says robots will make American manufacturers more competitive, and that will unlock more jobs.
“We’ve gone from 20 million manufacturing workers in 1979 to just 13 million today,” the company said in a press release announcing the new funding. “Manufacturers become more competitive when they put robots to work. And competitiveness is the key that unlocks company growth, job growth and wage growth.”
Standard Bots makes native artificial intelligence robot arms and industrial humanoid robots that it says can be taught by demonstrations rather than code. In other words, you show the robot the job. she watches, learns and starts doing the work herself. The takeaway is that this breaks down the cost and complexity that have kept advanced automation away from most American manufacturers, especially the small and medium-sized shops that make up the long tail of American industry. Customers range from Sunoco, Lockheed Martin, Amazon, NASA and the US military to hundreds of smaller manufacturers.
More growth will unlock more growth, says CEO Evan Beard. And a brighter future for American manufacturing.
“Robots native to artificial intelligence are the key power tool of the 21st century – the tool that will grow American manufacturing and help every worker be a force at work,” he said in a statement. “The fastest way to get to full autonomy is through development, collecting real-world data, and iterating as quickly as possible.”
Certainly, China has a better cost structure. But that’s only part of the story, the company says. The other part is investing in robotics. Last year, Standard Bots says, China installed nine times as many industrial robots as America. In fact, more than the rest of the world combined.
He’s not wrong about that.
According to the International Federation of RoboticsChina installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024 — 54% of the global total, more than the rest of the world combined — and its working robot stock now exceeds 2 million units, about 4.5 times that of second-place Japan. The Americas, as a whole, accounted for just 9% of new deployments.
Standard Bots is working to change that. The company says it will deliver 10% of new industrial robots in the US by next year. Beard also walks the made-in-America talk.
“Standard Bots designs nearly all of its own components, including its own actuators, assembles every final product in-house, and by 2027, plans to manufacture everything—from metal to robots outside—right here in America,” the company says.
(Note that the present tense in “designs almost all of its own parts” does not mean that it “makes all of its own parts” right now, although the company promises to do so, largely, within a year and a half.)
The new $200 million in funding should help.
The $200 million Series C was led by robotics fund RoboStrategy alongside existing backer General Catalyst. It’s a sharp increase from Standard Bots’ previous raise: the Glen Cove, New York, firm last raised $63 million in 2024 in a round also led by General Catalyst.
“Standard Bots stand out because they solved one of the toughest problems in industrial automation: building robots that are not only powerful, but can be used in the factory without specialized programming,” said Andrew Kang, CEO of RoboStrategy. General Catalyst partner Max Rimpel went further: “The democratization of robotics is no longer a slogan; it’s happening on factory floors across America.”
The big question is whether adding more robots actually means adding more jobs. Standard Bots says research proves it, citing a 2025 study by academics from the University of Minnesota with a researcher from the Universidad Pública de Navarra.
“We find about a 150% increase in job postings and a 15% increase in employment in factories that adopt robots compared to industry- and labor-market-matched non-adopters,” says the abstract for their paper. “Demands for design, maintenance and other technical skills are increasing for those who work with robots…these findings suggest increased competitiveness of robot adopters that increase output not only at the robotic stage of production but have positive spillover effects in the rest of the factory and in other factories within the same company.”
That sounds good, and it’s promising.
“Factory-, firm-, and industry-level analyzes suggest that productivity and human-robot complementarity dominate displacement, with job losses confined to non-adopter supercompetitors,” the paper also states.
An older one study of Spanish and French manufacturers found that companies that adopt robots expand the scale of their operations and add jobs, while non-adopters lose production and lay off workers under competitive pressure. This is how robots create jobs… in the companies that develop them. The catch is that a large part of these gains is redistribution. An even greater American studyBut he said one additional robot per thousand workers lowered the local employment-to-population ratio by about 0.2 percentage points and wages by about 0.42 percent.
I’m sure there will be a lot more research on this soon, and we really need it.
Generally, however, Standard Bots are not wrong about the basic problem.
The US didn’t just lose its factories because of labor costs. he lost them to the automation he refused to build. Standard Bots is betting $200 million that the solution to a bot vacuum is, ironically, more bots.
These are of course made in New York.
The question they will answer in the coming years is whether this brings back jobs or just work.
