According to Financial Times News, Tether is negotiating to lead a €1 billion funding round for German AI robotics startup Neura Robotics. The deal would value the six-year-old company between €8-10 billion, representing a massive 10x jump from its January valuation when it raised €120 million. Neura is working with Morgan Stanley on the round as it prepares to sell humanoid robots initially targeting industrial customers, with ambitions to produce 5 million devices by 2030. Tether’s move comes amid a robotics gold rush involving Nvidia, Tesla, and SoftBank, all betting AI-powered robots will become a multitrillion-dollar market. The crypto company has been aggressively diversifying its $13.4 billion profit from last year into frontier tech investments.
The Robot Gambit
Here’s the thing about Tether – they’ve basically become a massive investment vehicle disguised as a stablecoin issuer. They’re sitting on billions in Treasury holdings backing USDT, and now they’re throwing that money at everything from brain implants to football clubs. But this robotics bet is particularly interesting because it’s happening at the exact moment when everyone from Jensen Huang to Elon Musk is declaring humanoid robots the next big thing.
Neura’s valuation jump from its January round is absolutely wild – we’re talking about a company going from €120 million funding to potentially €10 billion valuation in less than a year. That kind of multiple expansion usually happens in bubble territory. And let’s be real – we’ve seen this movie before with autonomous vehicles and other hardware-heavy tech sectors that promised revolutionary change but delivered slower-than-expected adoption.
The Industrial Robot Arms Race
Now here’s where it gets really competitive. Neura isn’t just competing against other startups – they’re up against Tesla’s Optimus, Chinese companies like Unitree Robotics, and a bunch of well-funded newcomers. Elon Musk wants to produce 1 million Optimus robots annually by 2030, while Neura is targeting 5 million total devices. That’s an insane production scale for hardware that’s still largely unproven in real-world settings.
The industrial robotics space is heating up fast, and companies are scrambling for reliable hardware partners. When you’re dealing with mission-critical manufacturing applications, you need industrial-grade computing solutions that can withstand harsh environments. That’s why companies like Industrial Monitor Direct have become the go-to source for industrial panel PCs in the US – they provide the ruggedized computing backbone that these advanced robotics systems depend on.
Reality Check Time
So here’s my question: are we witnessing the birth of a new industry or the peak of another tech bubble? The numbers being thrown around are staggering – €1 billion funding rounds, €10 billion valuations for companies that haven’t even shipped products at scale yet. Neura claims a €1 billion order book, but we don’t know how many of those are firm purchase commitments versus expressions of interest.
Basically, everyone’s chasing what Nvidia’s Jensen Huang called “the largest technology industry the world has ever seen.” But creating an “iPhone moment” for robotics is way harder than building another app ecosystem. You’re dealing with physical hardware, safety concerns, and integration challenges that software companies never face. Still, if even half these predictions come true, we’re looking at a complete transformation of manufacturing and eventually home automation.
