My latest at Forbes: A new report from Bessemer Venture Partners makes a pretty stark case that the West is asleep at the wheel on robotics. In the past five years, 745 software companies raised more than $30 million each. The equivalent number for robotics? 42. That’s 18 times fewer funded companies in a space where the underlying market is 30 times larger than global software spend.
Meanwhile, 90% of all humanoid robots shipped in 2025 came from China. That’s not a narrow lead, that’s dominance. Bessemer’s Jeremy Levine predicts 100,000x more robots on Earth over the next 10 to 20 years, with most analysts projecting 50x growth in the robotics market this decade alone.
The math here is pretty uncomfortable. If you under-invest in a sector that’s about to explode, you don’t just miss the growth. You end up dependent on others who didn’t miss it. That’s the conversation the US and Europe need to be having loudly and urgently.