Robots, Domains, and a Busy Week in San Francisco

Auki Sponsors San Francisco’s First “Real Steel” Fight

We kicked off from San Francisco, where rek.tv hosted a robot fight controlled through VR headsets. As the champion sponsor, we backed the blue Unitree G1, piloted by Justin Kan (Twitch co-founder). The red robot was controlled by UFC fighter Hyder Amil. These G1s aren’t standard models—Unitree actually made “fighting versions” with reinforced hips.

Plenty of robotics teams and investors are attending, so it’s been a strong networking moment ahead of the Series A.

Meetings With Geodnet and Hivemapper

While in town, we’re meeting with two key DePIN players:

• Geodnet — discussing deeper collaboration inside Intercognitive (Auki and Geodnet are founders of Intercognitive. We're working on shared standards.)
• Hivemapper — first in-person meeting, exploring whether their collected imagery could serve as inputs for visual positioning and whether they may join Intercognitive as well

Internal Progress: Multi-Level Domains

In this week’s internal demo day, Jason and JB showed the first working prototype of multiple coordinate systems inside a single domain. This unlocks:

• Multi-floor buildings
• Split-level spaces
• Complex retail venues
• Mixed indoor/outdoor transitions

It’s been one of the most requested features, and early screenshots are already rolling in.

New Robotics Teams Joining

Liza has been reaching out to robotics labs across Hong Kong and China, and we’re now onboarding several academic and industry teams who want to build on the real world web. Some of these came directly from the traction around our live humanoid navigation demos.

New U.S. Paid Pilot

A large U.S. retailer (not grocery) with thousands of locations is starting a paid pilot: $15,000 for three test stores. If results look good, the intent is to expand across their full footprint.

Series A: Why We’re Raising $75M

We’re now deep in conversations for a $75M Series A. Soft commitments: $10–20M so far. Use of proceeds:

• Acquire a key partner we would otherwise rev-share with
• Deploy ~500 humanoid robots by end of 2026
• Deploy ~5,000 smart glasses
• Expand the team and secure runway through end of 2028

The goal is to hit the operational proof points needed for a follow-on raise to deploy 10,000+ robots in 2027–28.

Nils is risk on. “If you’re not willing to risk losing five or ten million on hardware, you’re not really playing to win the robotics race.”

Some investors are asking whether we should use credit or a distribution partner for the robot fleet; discussions are ongoing, but our preference is to keep the robots directly on our balance sheet.

A Few Notes From the Q&A

• We finally secured auki.com (leased, not purchased).
• Lots of “robotics” projects are cold-DMing us for partnerships; we’re declining all that are vibes-only.
• OpenMind has not reached out; we’ll likely meet them at a Singapore side event.
• Opinions on Optimus/Figure came up; short version: Figure looks more serious this year, Optimus less relevant until they ship.
• Terrible crypto-robotics ideas seen this week: “Let your robot mine Bitcoin when idle.”

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Watch the whole update on X.

About Auki

Auki is making the physical world accessible to AI by building the real world web: a way for robots and digital devices like smart glasses and phones to browse, navigate, and search physical locations.

70% of the world economy is still tied to physical locations and labor, so making the physical world accessible to AI represents a 3X increase in the TAM of AI in general. Auki's goal is to become the decentralized nervous system of AI in the physical world, providing collaborative spatial reasoning for the next 100bn devices on Earth and beyond.

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