China's Unitree opens its IPO subscription Aug 10 on Shanghai's STAR Market at a ~$6.2B valuation. Last year it shipped ~5,500 humanoids, more than anyone, on $237M revenue and 60% margins.

For contrast: US rival Figure is valued at $39B, 6× more, with almost no revenue.

A-shares are closed to foreign retail, so the way in is crypto — a pre-IPO perp is already live on MEXC (~$72, +8% today).

DeFi Saver has launched Token Saver, a free tool that scans any wallet for unclaimed tokens, after finding more than $67M sitting idle across roughly 87,000 DeFi smart wallets.

The forgotten balances span major assets including ETH, USDT, sUSDS and WBTC, the kind of leftover dust and unclaimed rewards that piles up as users move between protocols and forget old positions. Token Saver lets anyone paste a wallet address at tokensaver.fyi and see exactly what is recoverable.

For DeFi Saver, a long-running dashboard for building and managing positions across lending and yield protocols, a free wallet scanner is a natural hook: the idle value it surfaces is capital users may route back through its app.

TL;DR: In Part 1 we mapped the machines. Part 2 maps the brains: 21 startups building the foundation models, training infrastructure and applied labs and farms behind physical AI. Together the two parts cover Bessemer's full 50-company map.

A robot is only as smart as the model that runs it and the tools that train it. If Part 1 was the bodies, humanoids, drones and self-driving vehicles, this is the intelligence layer: the models, data and simulation stacks that turn motors into autonomy. Using Bessemer's atlas again, we grouped 21 more private leaders into four categories. Every name links to the company.

Foundation Models

The models giving robots a mind of their own.

World Labs: Fei-Fei Li's spatial-intelligence startup building world models that generate and reason over interactive 3D worlds.

Physical Intelligence: vision-language-action robot foundation models (the pi series) built to control any robot on any task.

Skild AI: the Skild Brain, an omni-bodied general-purpose robot foundation model out of Pittsburgh.

Generalist: hardware-agnostic robot foundation models (GEN-0/GEN-1) for general-purpose manipulation.

Dyna Robotics: DYNA-1, a commercial-ready robot foundation model for high-dexterity task automation.

Perceptron AI: foundation models for real-time multimodal perception and embodied reasoning.

Eka Robotics: vision-force-action foundation models using tactile sensing and sim-to-real for dexterity.

Field AI: Field Foundation Models, a general robot brain for GPS-free autonomy in unstructured environments.

Robotics Infrastructure

The plumbing that trains, tests and ships the machines.

Foxglove: a data, visualization and observability platform for robotics and autonomous systems.

Point One Navigation: centimeter-level GNSS positioning for autonomous systems.

Voxel51: FiftyOne, a data-curation platform for computer-vision and physical-AI datasets.

Zeromatter: a simulation platform for robotics, autonomy and aerospace.

Theseus: a GPS-denied visual navigation system that lets drones fly without GPS.

Health & Life Sciences

Robots and AI moving into the lab and the operating room.

Periodic Labs: AI scientists plus autonomous labs to automate materials discovery, from ex-OpenAI and DeepMind researchers.

Medra: AI robots that automate repetitive wet-lab bench work.

Radical AI: a self-driving autonomous lab pairing AI with robotic experimentation for new materials.

Mendaera: Focalist, a handheld robotic system pairing robotics with real-time ultrasound for needle-guided procedures.

Climate & Agriculture

Autonomy pointed at fields, orchards and wildfires.

Carbon Robotics: LaserWeeder AI robots and tractor autonomy for herbicide-free farming.

Orchard: FruitScope, an AI vision system for precision crop and fruit management.

Seneca: autonomous AI drones that detect and suppress wildfires.

Upside Robotics: solar-powered autonomous field robots for precise crop nutrient application.

Why it matters for crypto

If Part 1's machines are the demand side of a machine economy, Part 2 is its supply chain, and much of it maps cleanly onto crypto's open-infrastructure thesis. Training these robot brains needs enormous compute and data, exactly what decentralized compute and DePIN data networks aim to coordinate and pay for permissionlessly. The data that teaches robots to see and act becomes an asset worth owning, pricing and verifying, and onchain provenance is one way to prove where a model's training data and outputs came from. As autonomy spreads from labs to farms to city streets, the pipes that move value and trust between all these agents are the same rails crypto is already building.

This completes our two-part Physical AI map. See Part 1 for the machines themselves.

Source: Bessemer Venture Partners, "50 Startups Transforming Industries With Physical AI." Categorization adapted by CryptoDiffer. Not financial advice.

We mapped 29 private startups building the machines: humanoids (Figure, 1X), warehouse & construction robots (Bedrock, ANYbotics), self-driving vehicles (Waymo, Waabi) and autonomous defense systems (Anduril, Shield AI).

TL;DR: Physical AI, robots and autonomous systems that can see, understand and act in the real world, is leaving the lab. Using Bessemer's new atlas as a base, we mapped 29 private leaders across four arenas. This is Part 1; Part 2 is coming.

"Embodied intelligence" is having its moment. After decades of promise, robots are moving out of research labs and onto factory floors, city streets, battlefields and into homes, driven by three forces at once: foundation-model breakthroughs, collapsing hardware costs, and real labor shortages. Bessemer projects up to 2.5 billion robots worldwide by 2035 and calls this one of the biggest technological inflections of the generation.

Below are 29 private companies (Waymo included) building the machines, grouped into four categories. Every name links to the company.

Industrial Robotics

The robots quietly rewiring warehouses, construction sites and factories.

Bedrock Robotics: retrofit autonomy kit that turns existing excavators and dozers into self-driving machines.

Cobot: Proxie, a collaborative mobile manipulator for material handling.

DroneDeploy: drone-and-robot reality capture to map and monitor jobsites.

Mind Robotics: AI-native industrial robots for dexterous manufacturing (a Rivian spinoff).

Mytra: software-defined warehouse robotics for moving and storing pallets.

Tutor Intelligence: robot arms as a service for pick-and-sort in manufacturing and logistics.

Sereact: Cortex, a vision-language-action model for hardware-agnostic robotic picking.

ANYbotics: ANYmal, a quadruped robot for autonomous industrial inspection.

RobCo: modular, no-code robot arms for small and mid-size manufacturers.

Consumer Robotics

Humanoids and home robots aiming for the living room.

Figure: general-purpose humanoids (Figure 03) running its own Helix AI.

Matic: a vision-based, privacy-first robot vacuum-and-mop for the home.

Sunday Robotics: Memo, a home robot that learns chores like dishes and laundry.

Zipline: autonomous delivery drones for food, groceries and medical supplies.

1X: NEO, a bipedal humanoid built for the home.

The Bot Company: a household robot for everyday chores, from Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt.

Coco: autonomous electric sidewalk robots for urban last-mile delivery.

Autonomous Vehicles

The self-driving stacks moving people and freight.

Waymo: the robotaxi service built on the Waymo Driver.

Applied Intuition: simulation and software toolchain for autonomous vehicles and ADAS.

Wayve: end-to-end, mapless embodied-AI driving software.

Waabi: a generative-AI autonomy stack for self-driving trucks and robotaxis.

Nuro: a licensable Level 4 self-driving system, the Nuro Driver.

Defense

Autonomy for drones, ships and the battlefield.

Anduril: autonomous defense systems and the Lattice command platform.

Neros: low-cost, American-made FPV attack drones (Archer).

NODA AI: cross-vendor autonomy orchestration for military robot and drone fleets.

Auterion: AuterionOS, a drone operating system for defense and commercial fleets.

Saronic: autonomous unmanned surface vessels (sea drones) for the US Navy.

Shield AI: Hivemind, an AI pilot for autonomous drones and aircraft.

Skydio: AI drones for defense, public safety and infrastructure inspection.

Breaker Industries: Avalon, voice-controlled software orchestrating multi-domain robot teams.

Why it matters for crypto

Physical AI and crypto are converging faster than most think. As fleets of robots, drones and autonomous vehicles come online, they need to transact, coordinate and prove their work without humans in the loop, exactly the problem DePIN networks, machine-to-machine payments and onchain identity are built to solve. A world of billions of machines is also a world of billions of economic agents that can hold wallets, pay per task and settle in stablecoins. The hardware layer mapped above is where much of crypto's "agentic payments" and DePIN thesis will actually get tested.

This is Part 1 of our Physical AI map. Part 2, covering foundation models, agriculture, health and robotics infrastructure, is coming next.

Source: Bessemer Venture Partners, "50 Startups Transforming Industries With Physical AI." Categorization adapted by CryptoDiffer. Not financial advice.

JPYC, the issuer of Japan's first registered stablecoin, has raised $38M (about 6 billion yen) in an extended Series B to accelerate adoption of its yen-pegged token.

Backers include logistics group AZ-COM Maruwa, which plans to pay roughly 2,300 business partners in JPYC, and Metaplanet Ventures. JPYC launched Japan's first registered stablecoin in October 2025, is piloting payments at Lawson convenience stores, and is competing with SBI Group's JPYSC as megabanks weigh their own stablecoins.

Prime Agent is a fully open-source, self-improving coding and research harness built to handle general, long-horizon autonomous tasks rather than one-off prompts.

It rests on two abstractions. The Recursive Language Model treats context as a variable and sub-agent delegation as function calls inside a live REPL, so the agent can program over its own history and run very long sessions without losing information. The Continual Harness lets it edit its own prompts, skills, memory and sub-agents on the fly, while a '/refine' pipeline reads each run and applies the smallest change that improves future outcomes, making its self-improvement evidence-backed rather than random.

Prime Intellect points to early results: on the ARC-AGI 3 reasoning benchmark, Prime Agent hit 95.5% with Opus 5, edging past the reported human-expert baseline of 95.4%. The code is on GitHub, extending the lab's open, decentralized-AI push into agent tooling.

Days after his AI hedge fund Situational Awareness nearly collapsed, ex-OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner has put $400M into a private company, his first move to rebuild.

Last week the fund imploded from about $45B to $10B in assets as margin calls, driven by leverage reported up to 400%, forced it to dump public bets like SK Hynix and CoreWeave to Ken Griffin's Citadel at a discount. The $400M private investment, completed Tuesday, is the first sign of how the 20-something manager plans to pick up the pieces.

EON (Endeavor Optical Networks) has raised $10.75M in seed funding co-led by a16z and General Catalyst, with XYZ Venture Capital, Upfront Ventures and Main Object also joining.

Founded by CEO Charlie Horowitz and ex-NASA astronautical engineer Tyler Presser, EON plans a network of laser-equipped spacecraft to route data between data centers from Medium-Earth Orbit. It is pitched as a faster-to-deploy, harder-to-disrupt rival to the undersea cables that carry most intercontinental internet traffic, targeting CDNs, hyperscalers, telecoms and AI labs.

Plume has introduced Plume Vaults, a unified platform for its tokenized real-world asset (RWA) yield products, consolidating the ecosystem under a single brand while maintaining support for existing Nest Credit users.

The platform currently secures $178 million in TVL, has processed over $706 million in transaction volume, and has facilitated the minting of more than 195,000 RWAs.

Plume Vaults offers institutional-grade yield strategies across private credit, U.S. Treasuries, ETFs, and structured products, with support from partners including Apollo, Centrifuge, Superstate, FalconX, Binance Wallet, Bybit, EtherFi, and Pendle.

Plume also highlighted its compliance-focused infrastructure, including an SEC-registered transfer agent and conditional approval for a Class M Digital Asset Business Licence from the Bermuda Monetary Authority, positioning the platform for broader institutional adoption.