Last year, sources told Bloomberg that Meta plans to make humanoid robotic hardware to help with household chores.

Meta has acquired US start-up Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI) as it ramps up its plans to build humanoid technology.

Terms of the deal closed Friday (1 May) were not disclosed. The team at ARI, including co-founders Lerrel Pinto and Xiaolong Wang are set to join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs’ research division. They will be working closely with Meta’s Robotics Studio, launched last year.

“We acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a company at the frontier of robotic intelligence designed to enable robots to understand, predict, and adapt to human behaviours in complex and dynamic environments,” a Meta spokesperson told news publications.

ARI was founded in 2025 with the idea of achieving “physical artificial general intelligence (AGI)” according to Wang’s comments online. Wang is an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, and a former researcher at Nvidia.

“We believe this agent will be humanoid – and that scaling will come from learning directly from human experience, not teleoperation alone. Meta’s ecosystem brings together the key components needed to make this vision possible,” he added.

Meta said that ARI will “bring a deep expertise” to help the social media giant design its models for robot control and self-learning to “whole-body humanoid control”.

Bloomberg reported on Meta’s humanoid plans last year. According to a report from February, sources had told the publication that it was making “significant” investments in this category with goals to create humanoid robotic hardware to help with household chores.

The latest acquisition comes after a strong quarter at Meta, with revenue up 33pc to more than $56.3bn. The results were posted following a major workforce layoff announcement at the company, which would see 8,000 employees being made redundant globally.

Meanwhile, a previous Meta acquisition is unravelling at the seams after China blocked the company from completing its purchase of AI start-up Manus.

The robotics industry is witnessing a fresh wave of interest fuelled by AI. For the world’s biggest chipmaker Nvidia, robotics represents the biggest market for potential growth after AI. While Meta’s Big Tech contemporary, Amazon, made its own robotics-related acquisition with Fauna Robotics in March.

Google, on the other hand, revealed two new robotics AI models last year. Earlier this year, Alphabet’s AI company Intrinsic joined Google to further the company’s physical AI goals.

Japanese investment giant SoftBank bought Swiss electrical and engineering platform ABB robotics last October for around $5.4bn, adding the start-up to a robotics portfolio that includes the likes of Wayve. The Group’s chief financial officer Yoshimitsu Goto told investors last year that these investments bring “AI into the physical world…creating new opportunities for growth”.

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