Author: Zen, PANews
In recent years, discussions surrounding humanoid robots and embodied intelligence have shifted their focus to whether robots can create real-world value. From factory handling and warehouse sorting to collaborative service scenarios, robots are increasingly entering real-world environments.
More than the robots' mobility itself, the industry is concerned about when they can be deployed on a large scale and continuously perform real-world tasks. And if robots do begin to perform real-world labor, will they also need their own payment and settlement capabilities? This question has been brought to the forefront again after the German robotics company NEURA Robotics completed its latest round of financing.
On June 10, NEURA Robotics announced the completion of a Series C funding round of up to $1.4 billion, with Tether as the lead investor. Other investors included Qualcomm Technologies, Amazon, NVIDIA, Bosch, Schaeffer, and the European Investment Bank.
This funding round, touted as the "largest in history" in the full-stack robotics industry, is enough to make NEURA one of the most watched robotics companies in Europe and even globally. However, one easily overlooked but noteworthy aspect of this round is that Tether is also attempting to embed self-custodied wallets, stablecoin payments, and edge AI into robotic systems.
Largest financing in German company history
Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, NEURA Robotics did not initially enter the market with humanoid robots. Instead, it gradually expanded along the industrial automation route most familiar to European manufacturers, continuously adding AI capabilities to its robotic systems.
According to the German business media outlet Handelsblatt, NEURA has completed the largest funding round to date for a German company, valuing the company at $7 billion. For comparison, Unitree Robotics' IPO valuation was approximately 42 billion RMB, making the two roughly equivalent in terms of current valuation.
When founding NEURA, founder David Reger believed that while traditional industrial robots were widely used in manufacturing, they were essentially "blind" machines. They could repeat preset actions but lacked the ability to understand their environment and were difficult to collaborate safely with humans. Therefore, NEURA did not directly pursue the concept of humanoid robots in its early stages. Instead, it first launched collaborative robot (Cobot) products, hoping to enable robots to perceive their surroundings and respond autonomously to changes through vision, sensor fusion, and AI software.
Around 2021, the company launched the collaborative robot product line MAiRA (Multi-Sensing Intelligent Robotic Assistant), which was the first systematic implementation of its "Cognitive Robotics" concept.
Compared to traditional collaborative robots, MAiRA integrates vision systems, force feedback, safety sensing, and AI software into the robot body, enabling it to recognize people, objects, and the work environment, and work alongside humans without the need for complex fencing . For European manufacturing customers, this solution is easier to implement than completely replacing manual labor and better meets the practical needs of industrial automation upgrades.
Building a Silicon-Based Biological Network Platform
After completing its collaborative robot deployment, NEURA began expanding into a wider range of robot types. The company successively launched autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), service robots, and mobile manipulation robots, aiming to extend its cognitive capabilities from fixed workstations to warehousing and logistics, healthcare, and service scenarios. During this phase, NEURA's strategic focus shifted from individual robot products to building a robot ecosystem.
With increasing attention being paid to generative AI and embodied intelligence, humanoid robots are gradually becoming an important part of their product portfolios. NEURA launched its humanoid robot project 4NE-1 (pronounced "for anyone") in 2022, hoping to enter a wider range of scenarios such as manufacturing, logistics, services, and homes through a general-purpose robot form. Last year, the third-generation 4NE-1 product made its debut at the 2025 German Automation Show; at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), NEURA also launched the 4NE1 Mini, as well as a quadruped robot.
NEURA believes that the key to future competition will not just be mechanical structures, but who can accumulate more real-world data and enable different robots to share learning outcomes . This idea eventually evolved into the Neuraverse platform, and NEURA shifted its strategy from robot manufacturer to robot platform operator.
According to NEURA's vision, Neuraverse allows different robots, sensors, AI models, developers, and enterprise customers to access the same ecosystem. This enables robots to continuously accumulate and reuse experience gained in different scenarios, thus forming a network effect similar to the mobile internet application ecosystem . NEURA has since begun to use "Physical AI" more often to describe its technological direction, but its core narrative still revolves around robots' perception, understanding, autonomous decision-making, task learning, and continuous evolution.
Tether's Ambitions: Robots May Become a New Entry Point for the Crypto Industry
Prior to this funding round, NEURA's story was confined to the robotics and AI industry. However, with Tether's involvement, NEURA gained a unique foothold within the crypto industry, completing the settlement layer for its network.
According to Tether, NEURA's bot platform is expected to integrate Tether's open-source Wallet Development Kit (WDK), embedding self-custodial wallet functionality into the bot system. This concept does not aim to give bots complete autonomy over funds, but rather to allow the bot system to complete receiving, sending, and settling transactions within pre-defined rules.
In real-world scenarios, this design can be applied to the industrial and logistics sectors. For example, after a warehouse robot completes a handling task, the system can automatically trigger a settlement; after a service robot completes a cleaning, delivery, or inspection task, it can receive payment based on the amount of work completed, the duration of the task, or the distance traveled; small-amount settlements can also be completed between robots, charging equipment, warehousing systems, and scheduling systems from different companies through programmable payment tracks.
In the Robots as a Service (RaaS) model, this capability holds particular promise. Businesses don't necessarily purchase the robot itself; instead, they pay based on usage. If every task, every work session, and every device call can be automatically recorded and settled, the robot will not only serve as a value-creating production tool but also become a settlement node in the company's automated financial system.
This is precisely what Tether is interested in, and why the crypto industry deserves attention. In the past, stablecoins primarily served exchange transfers, on-chain transactions, cross-border payments, and dollar liquidity needs. However, if a large number of machines begin to enter real-world production processes in the future, crypto payments, on-chain settlements, and self-custodied wallets will have a new narrative interface, and stablecoins and self-custodied wallets may extend from "human financial instruments" to "machine payment infrastructure."
Furthermore, the collaboration between the two parties extends beyond WDK wallet tools to include the testing, optimization, and deployment of Tether's QVAC (QuantumVerse Automatic Computer) edge-first AI runtime framework within the Neuraverse ecosystem.
For robots, local execution means lower latency, greater operational resilience, and reduced reliance on a few large cloud service providers. In industrial scenarios, equipment downtime costs, execution accuracy, and data control capabilities are all critical, so this edge computing architecture helps improve system reliability. According to Tether's vision, true autonomy requires instantaneous response, and QVAC aims to keep intelligence at the edge, enabling local execution in scenarios where millisecond-level decisions are critical.
From this perspective, Tether is trying to enter two fundamental layers of the robotic era: the financial layer, enabling machines to use wallets and stablecoins to complete settlements; and the intelligent layer, allowing machines to run AI capabilities at the edge, rather than relying entirely on the remote cloud.
This aligns with Tether's recent trend of expanding its boundaries. It is no longer just a USDT issuer, but is extending its reach into AI, energy, data, and other infrastructure. NEURA's funding provides Tether with a testing ground to integrate stablecoins, self-custodied wallets, and edge AI into real-world machine networks.
