Meta Platforms Inc. has acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a startup developing artificial intelligence models for robots, as part of a major initiative to build humanoid technology. The social networking giant closed the acquisition Friday, according to a spokesperson. Meta said the startup is “at the frontier of robotic intelligence designed to enable robots to understand, predict and adapt to human behaviours in complex and dynamic environments.” Financial terms were not disclosed.
Acquisition Details and Team Integration
The Assured Robot Intelligence team, including co-founders Lerrel Pinto and Xiaolong Wang, will join the Meta Superintelligence Labs research division. The staff will work closely with Meta Robotics Studio, a team launched last year to work on underlying technology for humanoids. Pinto was previously a co-founder of Fauna Robotics before leaving in 2025, while Wang was a researcher at Nvidia Corp. Amazon acquired Fauna in March to bolster its own humanoid robot effort.
Meta's Humanoid Ambitions
Meta is making a significant investment in humanoids, futuristic robots that can move like humans and assist with physical tasks. The emerging sector has gained traction at major companies including Tesla Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, and Amazon.com Inc. Meta’s robotics team is working on in-house humanoid hardware and the underlying AI that powers it, including sensors, software, and other technology for robots that it will make available to others in the industry.
Strategic Vision
Meta’s goal is to provide what Google’s Android operating system and Qualcomm Inc.’s chips did for the phone industry by building a foundation for the rest of the market, as reported by Bloomberg News last year. The Assured Robot Intelligence employees, concentrated in San Diego and New York, will bring deep expertise in designing models and frontier capabilities for robot control and self-learning to whole-body humanoid control, the spokesperson said.
