Serve Robotics grew revenue 404% year over year and still cut its 2026 forecast by more than 60%. FORT Robotics is pursuing a public listing at a $556.6 million enterprise value. SoftBank invested $200 million in Gravis Robotics, a Swiss startup bringing autonomous capabilities to heavy equipment that companies already own.

In the first episode of The Business of Automation, Aaron Prather, Director of Market Intelligence at A3, examines what these stories reveal about platform dependency, vendor lock-in, safety infrastructure, retrofit autonomy and the growing concentration of robotics capital.

Serve shows what can happen when expected growth relies heavily on another platform’s customers and delivery volume. After lower-than-expected activity through Uber Eats, the company reduced its annual guidance and accelerated its expansion across Grubhub, DoorDash, advertising, software and healthcare robotics.

The lesson is not that partnerships are inherently bad. It is that part of your business plan belongs to someone else when your forecast depends on that company’s customers, interface or demand.

FORT represents a different strategy. Its safety hardware and software are designed to work across machines, manufacturers and applications. Aaron examines FORT’s effort to become shared safety infrastructure for physical AI, along with the valuation, shareholder-redemption risk and cash questions surrounding its proposed SPAC merger.

Gravis is addressing equipment lock-in from another direction. Its retrofit technology can add autonomy across multiple heavy-equipment brands without forcing companies to replace an entire fleet.

That model could have implications for construction, mining, agriculture, ports and other industries where replacing existing equipment is economically unrealistic. SoftBank’s investment also adds to its expanding robotics portfolio, creating a tension between increasingly vendor-agnostic technology and increasingly concentrated capital.

Together, these stories raise a question every automation buyer should ask: Who controls the relationship your operation depends on?

Read the deeper analysis, with every source linked and every number cited:

https://thebusinessofautomation.substack.com

This episode is presented by the A3 International Robot Safety Conference, November 3-5, 2026, at Huntington Place in Detroit.

Learn more and register:

https://www.automate.org/events/international-robot-safety-conference/register

Follow Aaron Prather:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/amprather

Explore A3:

https://www.automate.org