Meta has finalized the acquisition of Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI), a startup building humanoid robot systems, the company confirmed on Friday. The deal, reported by Investing.com, is the latest—and most distinctly robotics-focused—move in a series of acquisitions by the social-media giant as it works to plant its flag in the rapidly emerging humanoid robotics sector.
From AI Agents to Embodied Intelligence
ARI was co-founded by NYU computer science professor Lerrel Pinto and researcher Xiaolong Wang. According to Wang, the startup’s stated mission is to build super-intelligent humanoid robots at scale, with the goal of providing abundant physical labor for humanity. Pinto’s own research has centered on self-supervised robot learning and dexterous manipulation, and he has publicly forecast the deployment of one million robots by 2030.
The acquisition follows Meta’s decision earlier in 2025 to spin up a dedicated robotics division inside Reality Labs, led by former Cruise CEO Marc Whitten. CTO Andrew Bosworth has described humanoid robots as Meta’s next “AR-size bet”—a hint that billions of dollars in spending are on the way. Meta’s playbook so far appears to mirror what Google did with Android: rather than ship its own branded robot, the company intends to license its software platform to other manufacturers, a vision Bosworth laid out in an interview with The Verge last year.
Entering a Crowded, Fast-Moving Race
The ARI acquisition brings specialized robotics talent into a company that has already opened the checkbook on AI deals. That includes the $2 billion buyout of AI agent startup Manus in December 2025—a deal now under pressure after China’s National Development and Reform Commission ordered it unwound on April 27—as well as smaller acqui-hires of the Moltbook and Dreamer teams earlier this year.
Meta now enters a humanoid race featuring Tesla’s Optimus, Boston Dynamics’s Atlas, and well-funded startups such as Figure AI. Goldman Sachs analysts project the humanoid robot market could reach $38 billion by 2035. The momentum is showing up in deals across the board: Mobileye recently acquired humanoid startup Mentee Robotics for $900 million in January, and Amazon picked up robotics startup Rivr in March.
With ARI on board, Meta gets a team whose work on scalable robot learning and real-world manipulation lines up neatly with its existing efforts in embodied AI and the sensor stacks already developed for Quest headsets and Ray-Ban smart glasses. Whether Meta can convert its AI software strengths into a winning robotics platform is still an open question—Bosworth himself has admitted that consumer-ready humanoid robots remain a few years out.
