RoboStrategy CEO Andrew Kang: Humanoid Robot Industry Will Consolidate Due to Talent Scarcity, With Only a Few Winners Emerging
Andrew Kang, CEO of closed-end fund RoboStrategy, argues that despite over a hundred humanoid robot companies in the US, the industry will ultimately see only a few winners due to the extreme global scarcity of top-tier interdisciplinary experts. He favors Tesla, Figure AI, and Apptronik, noting that capital is not the primary bottleneck, but rather the difficulty of aggregating sufficient specialized talent.
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As humanoid robot technology advances rapidly, a large number of startups have emerged in the market. However, Andrew Kang, CEO of RoboStrategy, a closed-end investment fund focused on robotics, presents a counter-intuitive view: this booming industry will not produce dozens of winners, but only a few companies will achieve overwhelming success. Kang argues that the key factor determining success is not the amount of capital, but the extreme scarcity of professional knowledge and industry talent.
According to statistics, there are currently 112 companies in the US engaged in humanoid robot manufacturing, component supply, software, and artificial intelligence, while China has over a hundred similar companies. Despite the numerous competitors, Kang truly favors only three: Tesla, Figure AI, and Apptronik. He points out that running a top-tier robotics company requires experts in machine learning, behavior control, computer vision, limb engineering, battery engineering, and product management simultaneously. However, globally, there may only be a few hundred people with these top-level professional capabilities. Gathering these scarce talents from different fields into one company while raising billions of dollars is extremely difficult.
This means that while software development can scale and capital can be sourced from multiple channels, the supply of physical AI experts cannot expand quickly. This talent bottleneck leads to natural industry consolidation. Kang cautiously states that companies not favored do not necessarily mean total failure, but only a few enterprises can overcome the barrier of talent aggregation to launch humanoid robots that can truly manipulate objects and understand the real world, developing into sufficiently large businesses.