On Tuesday, Austin-based Apptronik, a manufacturer of humanoid robots, unveiled a new pilot project with Jabil, a manufacturing and supply chain giant in the United States. The agreement comes two weeks after Apptronik revealed plans to raise $350 million in a Series A funding round to increase the manufacture of its Apollo robot.
The Jabil agreement is Apptronik’s second significant pilot. It comes after a collaboration that saw Apollo working on the Mercedes-Benz factory floor in March 2024.
With this new agreement, Florida-based Jabil and Apptronik will become manufacturing partners and test-run the humanoid robot on their production floor. After Apollo’s commercial viability is established, Jabil will start manufacturing the robot in its own facilities. This implies that the humanoid robot will eventually be used to construct itself if all goes as planned.
Such agreements appear to be inevitable given the manufacturing-focused nature of the humanoid industry. For Apptronik, however, the possibility of humanoids creating humanoids is still a ways off. The robot’s business recently informed TechCrunch that it plans to start producing commercial units in 2026.
The Jabil arrangement would first see an unspecified number of Apollo systems handling a variety of “simple, repetitive intralogistics and manufacturing tasks,” such as part sorting and transportation. One of the most important steps in getting the robot ready for production is real-world validation. Apollo’s chances of fitting into a production line that eventually includes Apollo itself increase with its performance on the Jabil factory floor.
Several companies, including Agility, Boston Dynamics, Figure, and Tesla, are producing humanoid robots for industrial use, including Apptronik. Agility is the only one of them that has declared that its robots have been used after a preliminary pilot stage.
Although there is fierce competition in the new market, Apptronik has several advantages. The University of Texas offshoot has been working on humanoids for ten years, including NASA’s Valkyrie robot, and has received hundreds of millions of dollars in financing. In order to create AI for its humanoid systems, Apptronik and Google DeepMind launched a collaboration last December.
