Startup life moves fast, and this year we’ve been shipping nonstop.
Terri, our first (and still best) humanoid robot, kicked off the year for us with his grand entrance in January, and we spent the first half of the year sprinting toward AWE and SuperAI in June. These were major conferences where we showed off progress by Auki and our partners in the form of live demos including app-free navigation, spatially aware smart glasses, interoperable robotics, and marker-free VPS. Along the way, we signed our first 7 digit ARR deal for Cactus, our physical AI copilot for retail.
But we already went into those details in our Auki 2025 mid-year recap, so this post will focus on July through December.
July
AI conference invitations: Nils became popular following his SuperAI keynote in June and was subsequently invited to several more events. Two of these took place in July: RAISE Summit in Paris and Fortune’s Brainstorm AI event, where he and Terri gave a talk called The Robot Will See You Now.
Our second humanoid robot: Terri got an understudy when Mech Jagger arrived. He’s an EngineAI PM01, and he’s quite the dancer.
Mech Jagger ᛗ
August
State of the Auki Network: We released this video review of the first half of 2025, highlighting top builders on the real world web and their many varied use cases.
Meeting a head of state: Terri was on stage with the Malaysian Prime Minster at the ASEAN AI Malaysia Summit where the security team’s radio frequency jammers made him lock up — literally.
Customer-facing navigation at a Pepito store in Bali
Reconstruction node beta launch: We finally open sourced our long-awaited reconstruction node and kicked off a closed beta with a handful of community node operators!
Whitepaper update: Our whitepaper got a new foreword and part one. Read it to understand what we’re building, why we’re building it, and why we’re confident we’re going to win.
September
Autonomous humanoid navigation: Terri became the first humanoid robot in the world to connect to the real world web and demo large scale autonomous humanoid robot navigation in a brand new venue.
REK0: Auki sponsored the world’s first VR piloted humanoid robot fight, and our robot won!
October
App-agnostic, device-agnostic spatial orchestration: In another world first, we live demoed real time spatial orchestration between Mentra smart glasses, Terri the Unitree G1 humanoid robot, and a Padbot X3. Three devices from three companies all connected to the real world web and could navigate autonomously to each other.
Token2049:Intercognitive, co-founded by Auki, peaq, Geodnet, Mawari, and Tashi, hosted an invite-only side event to network with the biggest players in web3 robotics with the goal of coming together to write the interoperability standards for making the physical world accessible to AI.
OneShot: Auki ecosystem builder and grant recipient Mika Haak spent some time at our HQ developing OneShot, an AI copilot built on Mentra glasses and Auki’s real world web that guides users through their job and corrects mistakes. [RECAP VLOG TO COME]
Floorcraft: Former Auki contributor Darko Tomic took up the torch on Floorcraft, our old AR multiplayer game, and gave it a refresh complete with web3 wallet integration and NFT-based in-game unlocks.
Rice AI moves in: Another member added to the HK web3 robotics cabal! Rice AI have deployed hundreds of their robots across Hong Kong and Japan, and decided to move in with us to integrate their robots with the real world web. They even joined us for a community update.
Terri with Rice robots
November
Robot deployment in 2 minutes: Our Head of Robotics showed off robot deployment on the real world web, going from fresh-out-of-the-box to knowing where every product is in a store and being able to navigate there in 2 minutes. Same demo on two different robots, one with a camera and one without.
First paid pilot in the US: We kicked off a Cactus pilot with a US Fortune 500 retailer and hope for this to be our first 8 figure ARR deal.
First Cactus pilot in the US
Multi-floor domains: Exciting progress was made on this much-anticipated feature which will enable real world web domains to be set up in multi-floor venues.
Gaussian reconstructions: Point clouds are great, but some use cases need more photorealistic reconstructions. So we began experimenting with Gaussian splat reconstructions and made good progress.
Dashboard & promo robots: Since showing promos is an oft-requested feature for store robots, we now have robots driving around the store showing different promos based on location, together with a dashboard to manage them.
Voice commands for customer-facing robot: Those same store robots can interact with customers through voice commands, answering questions and guiding customers to products.
FairPrice: They are Singapore's largest retail chain, and they signed on for a paid pilot to begin in January.
Combine our latest demos — autonomous navigation, spatial orchestration, and deployment in 2 minutes — and suddenly robot deployment becomes feasible at scale. 2025 was a year of building foundations in both technology and partnerships, finding product market fit, and designing the best robot deployment strategy we've seen of any robotics company. 2026 will be about bringing all the pieces together and executing on that strategy, and we couldn't be more optimistic.
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