Robots are the bad guys when it comes to jobs, right? But Standard Bots, which today announced a $200 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation, says robots will make American manufacturers more competitive, and that will unlock more jobs.
“We’ve gone from 20 million manufacturing workers in 1979 to only 13 million today,” the company said in a press release announcing the new funding. “Manufacturers become more competitive when they put robots to work. And competitiveness is the key that unlocks company growth, job growth, and wage growth.”
Standard Bots makes AI-native robot arms and industrial humanoid robots that it says can be taught by demonstrations rather than code. In other words, you show the robot the job; it watches, learns and starts doing the job itself. The pitch is that this collapses the cost and complexity that have kept advanced automation out of reach for most American manufacturers, especially the small and mid-sized shops that make up the long tail of U.S. industry. Customers range from Sunoco, Lockheed Martin, Amazon, NASA and the U.S. Army to hundreds of smaller manufacturers.
More growth will unlock more growth, says CEO Evan Beard. And a better future for American manufacturing.
“AI-native robots are the essential power tool of the 21st century – the tool that will grow American manufacturing and help every worker to be a force at work,” he said in a statement. “The quickest way to get to full autonomy is through deployments, collecting real-world data, and iterating as fast as possible.”
Sure, China has a better cost structure. But that’s only part of the story, the company says. The other part is investment in robotics. Last year, Standard Bots says, China installed nine times more industrial robots than America. In fact, more than all the rest of the world combined.
He’s not wrong about that.
According to the International Federation of Robotics, China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024 — 54% of the global total, more than the rest of the world combined — and its operational robot stock now exceeds 2 million units, roughly 4.5 times that of second-place Japan. The Americas, all of them, accounted for just 9% of new deployments.
Standard Bots is working to change that. The company says it will deliver 10% of new U.S. industrial robot deployments by next year. Beard is also walking the made-in-America talk.
“Standard Bots designs almost all its own parts, including its own actuators, assembles every final product in-house, and by 2027, plans to manufacture everything – from metal in to robots out – right here in America,” the company says.
(Note that present tense in “designs almost all its own parts” does not mean “makes all its own parts” right now, although the company is promising to do so, largely, within a year and a half.)
The new $200 million in funding should help.
The $200 million Series C was led by the robotics fund RoboStrategy alongside existing backer General Catalyst. It’s a steep markup from Standard Bots’ previous raise: the Glen Cove, New York company last raised $63 million in 2024 in a round also led by General Catalyst.
“Standard Bots stands out because they’ve solved one of the hardest problems in industrial automation: making robots that are not only powerful, but actually usable on the factory floor without specialized programming,” said Andrew Kang, CEO of RoboStrategy. General Catalyst partner Max Rimpel went further: “The democratization of robotics is no longer a slogan; it’s happening on factory floors across America.”
The big question is whether adding more robots really does mean adding more jobs. Standard Bots says the research proves it, citing a 2025 study by University of Minnesota academics with a researcher from Universidad Pública de Navarra.
“We find approximately 150% increase in job postings and 15% increase in employment in plants that adopt robots compared to non-adopters matched by industry and labor market,” the abstract for their paper says. “Requirements for design, maintenance and other technical skills increase for those who work with robots … these findings suggest increased competitiveness of robot adopters that raise output not only in the robotized stage of production but have positive spillover effects in the rest of the plant and in other plants within the same firm.”
That sounds good, and it’s hopeful.
“Our plant, firm, and industry level analyses suggest that productivity and human-robot complementarity effects dominate displacement, with job losses limited to outcompeted non-adopters,” the paper also says.
An older study of Spanish and French manufacturers found that firms that adopt robots expand their scale of operations and add jobs, while non-adopters lose output and shed workers under competitive pressure. So robots do create jobs … at the companies that deploy them. The catch is that a big chunk of those gains is reallocation. An even older American study, however, said that one additional robot per thousand workers lowered the local employment-to-population ratio by about 0.2 percentage points and wages by roughly 0.42%.
I’m sure there will be a lot more research on this shortly, and we need it badly.
In general, however, Standard Bots isn’t wrong about the core problem.
The U.S. didn’t lose its factories purely on labor costs; it lost them on automation it declined to build. Standard Bots is betting $200 million that the fix for a robot gap is, ironically, more robots.
These ones, of course, are made in New York.
Whether that brings the jobs back, or just the work, is the question the next few years will answer.
