Investors Warn: AI Hype Is Fueling A Bubble In Humanoid Robotics

(MENAFN- Investor Ideas) December 16, 2025. Investorideas ( Newswire) Recent major venture capital (VC) reports from KPMG and PitchBook confirm that AI remains in the lead, accounting for more than half of all investments this year. Data from CB Insights shows that investors' attention inside the AI market is shifting rapidly toward industrial humanoid robotics. As a result, investors argue the flood of AI capital is pushing robotics toward a speculative zone, with too many startups promising breakthroughs without commercial evidence.

Last quarter, industrial humanoid robotics captured 17 deals – the most of any category. AI was still the primary destination for investors, split into several categories, such as coding AI agents and copilots (14 deals), end-to-end software development AI agents (12), and others.

Rapid growth of the sector has already sparked fears of a bubble from the Chinese leading economic planning industry, which said that the humanoid robotics industry needs to“balance the speed against the risks of bubbles,” Bloomberg reported.

Investors' appetite for humanoid robots is largely driven by AI, because AI gives humanoids a commercial potential that was previously not possible.

According to Daiva Rakauskaitė, the partner and manager of Aneli Capital, a company that manages a €35 million fund for early-stage Central and Eastern European startups, there are strong similarities between today's AI-driven investment boom and the dotcom bubble in the early 2000s, leaving many startups exposed. She expects an AI bubble burst in 2-3 years.

Currently, companies around the world demonstrate prototypes of robots performing actions from running to boxing, sparking interest from users and investors. However, in the real world, they have few practical commercial applications.

Similar challenges also persist for industrial humanoid robotics. These companies face challenges with inference (ability to make decisions in real time), dexterity (how well the robot can physically handle things), reliability, and cost, which limit the initial use cases to factories and warehouses with predictable sets of tasks, CB Insights report claims.

According to Rakauskaitė, especially now, when investments are driven by hype, VCs should not forget the fundamentals and prioritize revenue-first philosophy, where real money matters more than growth at all costs.

Despite early signs of a bubble in humanoid robotics, she remains confident in the broader robotics sector, where cheaper hardware and rapid advances in AI are accelerating real-world deployment.

According to Rakauskaitė, robotics is an especially promising field for the CEE startups. The region is located close to Germany, the largest industrial robotics market in Europe, which provides a major strategic advancement to scaling.

About Aneli Capital

Aneli Capital is a fund management company that manages an early-stage venture capital fund, Aneli Venture Capital Fund, based in Vilnius. The fund (size of €35 million), licensed by the Bank of Lithuania, was launched in November 2025 to grow startups across Lithuania, the Baltics, Poland, and the wider CEE region. It backs startups in ICT, robotics, energy, space, photonics, and smart manufacturing. Led by a team with over three decades of experience in venture investing and fund management, Aneli takes an active, hands-on role in helping founders strengthen their operations, build sustainable growth, and prepare for follow-on investment.

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