Meta has acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a humanoid robotics startup, for an undisclosed amount, the company announced.

“We acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a company at the frontier of robotic intelligence designed to enable robots to understand, predict, and adapt to human behaviors in complex and dynamic environments,” a Meta spokesperson stated in an emailed statement.

ARI’s team, including its co-founders, will join Meta’s AI division under its Superintelligence Labs research group, according to TechCrunch.

The startup had previously raised an undisclosed seed round from AI-focused investor AIX Ventures.

ARI was developing foundation models for humanoid robots designed to handle a wide range of physical tasks, including household chores.

Its co-founder Xiaolong Wang was formerly a researcher at Nvidia and an associate professor at UC San Diego, with a record of notable academic awards.

His co-founder Lerrel Pinto previously taught at NYU and co-founded the kid-sized humanoid robotics startup Fauna Robotics, which was later acquired by Amazon, and has also received several major research honours.

Meta researchers have been developing humanoid robotics technology for several years.

A leaked internal memo from about a year ago outlined the company’s ambitions to build a humanoid robot, including both AI systems and hardware designed for potential consumer use.

Even if Meta does not ultimately launch a consumer-facing humanoid robot, many AI researchers argue that progress toward artificial general intelligence, a theoretical stage where AI matches or exceeds human-level intelligence across a wide range of tasks—may depend on grounding models in the physical world.

In this view, robots that learn through real-world interaction, rather than relying solely on text or image data, could play a key role in advancing general-purpose intelligence.