An Evolving Thesis  ·  v1.0  ·  June 2026

A Billion Robots

The world will build its first billion general-purpose robots before 2030. This is a living record of what we learn as we help build it — week by week, from the ground up.

By Ethan Aldrich, Erikson Kuebler & Raymond Xu
The thesis,
in brief

Robots are about to follow the same curve software did — only this time the marginal unit is physical labor, and the addressable market is the entire economy. The bottleneck was never imagination; it was capability, cost, and capital. All three are breaking at once.

We think the count of deployed, economically-useful robots crosses one billion within four years — before 2030. Getting there is not one story but a dozen — industrial, logistics, the home, agriculture, healthcare, defense — each with its own unlock, its own buyer, its own decade.

This is our attempt to track all of them honestly, hold ourselves to predictions, and update in public as the picture sharpens. We are not bystanders to this — we invest in it and we build it.