Tether Anchors Up to $1.4bn NEURA Robotics Round, Embedding Wallets in Humanoid Robots

The round valued the Metzingen-based company, founded in 2019, at about $7bn, Bloomberg and CNBC reported, citing people familiar with the matter. NEURA declined to comment on the figure. The full amount was contingent on the company hitting performance milestones, according to CNBC.

Ten-strong investor consortium

NEURA disclosed the wider investor list in a separate statement on the same day: chipmakers Qualcomm Technologies and NVIDIA, Amazon, German industrial groups Bosch and Schaeffler, semiconductor fund imec.xpand, the European Investment Bank, Lingotto Horizon and InterAlpen Partners, as well as unnamed others. Tether was the only crypto company in the round.

Wallets for autonomous machines

Through subsidiary Tether Investments, the stablecoin issuer will embed its open-source Wallet Development Kit and QVAC edge-AI runtime into NEURA's robotic platforms. The kit gives robots a way to receive payments and execute transactions within preset parameters; QVAC lets AI models run locally on a device rather than via hyperscale cloud providers.

"Autonomous machines need the ability to process information locally, make decisions, and transact without relying on centralized intermediaries," Tether chief executive Paolo Ardoino said.

NEURA described the financing as "the largest of a full-stack robotics company ever" and said the capital would drive "serial production to multi-million robots by 2030." Its order book exceeded $1bn, it said.

"AI will not only live on screens. It will move, interact, learn and work beside us in the real world," said NEURA founder and chief executive David Reger.

Robotics companies raised $55.8bn in the year through early June, nearly double the previous annual record, according to Dealroom data cited by CNBC.