Bear Robotics agrees to buy Kinisi Robotics, adding a wheeled humanoid and manipulation AI

Bear Robotics/Servi

Bear signed a deal to acquire Kinisi Robotics of Bristol, UK, founded by Bear co-founder Brennand Pierce. Kinisi's KR1 wheeled humanoid, its robot AI models and its engineering team join Bear, so its fleet can pick, place and sort, not just carry. Pierce returns as Chief Robotics Officer.

• Bear says it has shipped more than 16,000 service robots worldwide.
• Kinisi brings vision-language-action models and a low-cost glove for collecting training data.
• Bear's fleet data is meant to speed up training of the manipulation models.
• Closing was expected within days of the announcement.