Techies are throwing billions at robots; the 'hardware tourists' are piling in

Getty Images; Rebecca Zisser/BI For decades, hardware was a hard sell in Silicon Valley.

Now investors are pouring tens of billions into machines that can do things in the real world.

A Goldilocks set of conditions has made robotics one of tech's hottest bets.

As investors look beyond chatbots to the next frontier in AI, cheaper hardware, smarter AI models, labor shortages, and competition with China are fueling interest in machines capable of performing physical work.

Robotics and physical AI companies raised $33.4 billion globally in the first half of this year alone, according to PitchBook data.

That's already more than the $28.7 billion the sector raised in all of last year — and an astronomical rise from 2020, when funding came in at just under $5 billion.

Investors are writing billion-dollar checks to fund both the machines and the AI brains behind them.

Defense company Anduril raised $5 billion in May, co-led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.

Autonomous shipbuilder Saronic raised $1.75 billion in March in a round led by Kleiner Perkins.

Skild AI, which builds software to control different kinds of robots, raised $1.4 billion in January in a round led by SoftBank.

Physical Intelligence, which is also building an AI model to command robots, raised about $1 billion in May, co-led by Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness and Lux Capital.

"This is off the charts," Ken Goldberg, a UC Berkeley robotics professor and cofounder of warehouse robotics startup Ambi Robotics, told Business Insider.

"In my 45 years in this field, this is the most funding and energy and interest in robotics that I've ever seen." This is the first installment of Robonomics, Business Insider's new series on the rise of robots and their impact on business, jobs, and everyday life.

We'll go inside factories and warehouses where humans work alongside robots, meet the founders, investors, and workers driving the boom, and examine how the technology is reshaping industries from manufacturing to defense.