The Japan Times - Bear Robotics to Acquire Kinisi Robotics, Completing Its End-to-End Physical AI Robotics Platform

REDWOOD CITY, CA / ACCESS Newswire / June 22, 2026 / Bear Robotics today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Kinisi Robotics, in a transaction that will make Kinisi part of Bear. On closing, Kinisi's KR1 humanoid robot, its Bristol-based engineering team, and its Physical AI capabilities will be integrated into Bear Robotics, completing Bear's end-to-end Physical AI robotics platform. The transaction is expected to close in the coming days.

Bear has built the world's most widely deployed fleet of service robots - more than 16,000 shipped into commercial service worldwide. Bear's robots already work together as one coordinated team through agentic multi-robot orchestration, moving freely through busy, changing spaces instead of following fixed tracks or routes. Most robotics companies are still trying to get from pilot to product; Bear is already there, with the robots, customers, manufacturing, and real-world data in place. Kinisi adds the missing piece - the AI that lets robots handle objects - so the same fleet can go beyond moving and cleaning to picking, sorting, and handling physical work.

Why Bear Is Acquiring Kinisi

Kinisi has been building on Bear's production navigation stack since the company was founded - the same technology that powers Bear's commercial fleet. That technical relationship gave Bear an unusually clear view into the quality of Kinisi's engineering, the maturity of its KR1 manipulation platform, and the depth of its Physical AI research.

It also shows why the two companies are stronger together. This isn't a robot arm bolted onto someone else's machines. Bear's delivery robots, floor cleaners, and - with Kinisi - humanoids all run on one platform and work as a single coordinated team, not a patchwork of products from different vendors. The two sides also feed each other: Bear's fleet produces a constant stream of real-world data from thousands of sites, while Kinisi's hands-on data-capture tools add manipulation examples cheaply and quickly - together training Kinisi's AI models faster than either company could alone. In one step, Bear gains the manipulation technology and the research team it would otherwise have spent years building.

It also reunites Bear with Brennand Pierce - a co-founder of Bear - and Bear looks forward to welcoming Bren and the team he has assembled back into the company once the transaction closes.

What Kinisi Brings to Bear

• The KR1 humanoid robot - a wheeled humanoid platform designed for picking, placing, sorting, and moving objects across industrial, logistics, and hospitality environments.

• Proprietary manipulation models - a vision-language-action (VLA) model and a robot foundation model (RFM) - built on a modern AI infrastructure stack, spanning imitation learning, reinforcement learning, agentic task control, and computer vision for object detection, localisation, segmentation, tracking, and classification.

• In-house gripper and end-effector design, plus a low-cost, robot-agnostic glove that captures manipulation demonstrations by hand - decoupling training-data collection from robot time and scaling the demonstrations the models learn from.

• A team of world-class Physical AI engineers and researchers, including talent with advanced degrees from the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge.

• A European engineering hub in Bristol, extending Bear's footprint into the United Kingdom alongside its existing Bay Area operations.

What This Means for Customers and Partners

Until closing, Bear Robotics and Kinisi Robotics continue to operate as separate, independent companies. Existing customer relationships, pilots, evaluations, and points of contact on each side continue unchanged in the interim period.

On closing, this acquisition will expand the range of work Bear's robots can do - on the same platform Bear customers already rely on. For Kinisi customers, your point of contact and your in-flight pilot will continue uninterrupted under Bear, with the operational scale of Bear behind every deployment, including production manufacturing, fleet management, deployment services, and customer support.

In Japan, Bear Robotics will continue its close collaboration with SoftBank Robotics, a leading robotics solutions provider and integrator, to bring these expanded Physical AI and manipulation capabilities to customers across the region and to advance a shared vision for coordinated, multi-robot automation.

The Bristol office will continue as a strategic engineering hub for Bear. On closing, Bren will join Bear's leadership team as Chief Robotics Officer, continuing to lead the Kinisi engineering organisation with the KR1 platform under his direction.

A Note from Brennand Pierce, Founder and CEO of Kinisi Robotics

"Signing this agreement is the right next step for Kinisi and for the KR1. We built Kinisi on Bear's navigation stack from day one because we believed it was the strongest foundation in the industry. What Bear has that no one else does is a real Physical AI platform already operating at commercial scale - deployed robots, enterprise customers, manufacturing, and cloud orchestration. Manipulation is the missing layer, and that's what Kinisi brings. Together we're not building one humanoid in isolation; we're completing an integrated, multi-robot automation platform. I'm excited about what we're going to build."

- Brennand Pierce, Founder and CEO, Kinisi Robotics; Chief Robotics Officer, Bear Robotics (on closing)

A Note from John Ha, Founder and CEO of Bear Robotics

"Bear was built to put robots to work in the real world, and we've spent years building the platform to do it: thousands of robots deployed, one cloud orchestration stack, real enterprise customers, and a manufacturing supply chain behind them. Kinisi completes that platform. Its manipulation AI is the layer that lets our robots move from navigating and delivering to actually handling the work in front of them. Most companies are trying to get from a pilot to a product; we're expanding from a deployed commercial fleet into full Physical AI automation. I want to thank the Kinisi team for what they've built in the KR1, our customers and partners for their continued trust, and our employees and investors for backing this next chapter. This is the start of a much bigger chapter for Bear."

- John Ha, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Bear Robotics

About Bear Robotics

Bear Robotics was founded in Silicon Valley in 2017 by former Google engineers who set out to take the physical strain out of hospitality - an idea that began in founder and CEO John Ha's own restaurant. Nine years later, Bear has grown that idea into a full-stack Physical AI platform: its own robots, agentic multi-robot orchestration, and the real-world data they generate - now automating everyday physical work across hospitality, healthcare, retail, logistics, and multi-story real estate in North America, Europe, and Asia. Bear's product family includes Servi Plus, Servi Q, Servi Clean, and Carti. Learn more at www.bearrobotics.ai.

About Kinisi Robotics

Kinisi is an AI-powered robotics company building practical humanoid robots for warehouses, factories, and logistics environments. Our flagship platform, the KR1, combines proven autonomous navigation, precise manipulation, and a proprietary AI foundation model that learns new tasks from human demonstration in a single day, without facility modifications or custom engineering. Kinisi operates on a RaaS model, enabling enterprise customers to deploy robots quickly and cost-efficiently, with full software updates, maintenance, and ongoing model improvements included. Kinisi is currently running paid pilot programs with leading companies across manufacturing, logistics, and retail. Every robot deployed feeds real-world performance and demonstration data back into the Kinisi foundation model, creating a compounding learning advantage that makes each new deployment faster and more capable than the last. Kinisi was founded by Bren Pierce, previous co-founder of Bear Robotics, and is headquartered in Bristol, UK, with engineering talent drawn from world-class institutions and companies including Dyson, Amazon, Cambridge, and Oxford.

MEDIA CONTACT
Gennaro Gallo, Head of Marketing, Bear Robotics
[email protected]

SOURCE: Bear Robotics, Inc

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T.Sato--JT