The company whose robots do backflips and dance in the viral videos. Today it's fully owned by Hyundai, the South Korean car maker, and it no longer wants to entertain - it wants to work the line.
The company starts as a research project at MIT, funded mainly by DARPA - the research agency of the US military, looking for robots able to carry heavy equipment over terrain cars can't reach. That's where their first famous robot comes from - a four-legged beast called BigDog, which staggers but doesn't fall, even when you kick it. The military origin explains why Boston Dynamics' machines have always looked different from industrial robots. They're not bolted to the floor - they move like animals.
In practice the company offers three things today. Spot looks like a large mechanical dog and walks around factories and construction sites on its own - reads gauges, photographs anomalies, goes into places dangerous for a person. Stretch is the quiet one of the three: it moves boxes in warehouses and stores. Atlas is the newer, pricier bet: a two-legged robot that, by the company's own account, is still in development, and the job it's being prepared for in Hyundai's plants is sorting and arranging car parts on the conveyor. A small task at first glance, but that exact monotony is the thing people hate doing for eight hours.
The company's ownership is a strange odyssey. Google buys it in 2013, gets disillusioned by the lack of a fast product, and sells it to SoftBank, the Japanese investment giant, in 2017. Hyundai comes in with a majority stake in 2021, and this year bought out the remaining shares from SoftBank too - now it's fully theirs. The logic is simple: a conglomerate that builds cars on assembly lines finally has its own plant to test the robots as a workforce, not as a demo.
The scale is no longer symbolic. Hyundai told investors it plans to put over 25,000 Atlas robots into its own car plants by 2028 - that's most of their production capacity. In other words, the robot that until recently did backflips for the camera and likes is on its way to becoming a regular worker on the assembly line.
Since October 7, 2026 the company has a new chief executive: Rohit Prasad. He spent twelve years at Amazon, where he built Alexa from its earliest days and later led the Nova family of models, and before that nearly 14 years in machine-learning research at Raytheon BBN. The choice speaks for itself: at the head of a robot company now stands a man who has spent decades turning artificial intelligence into products. The board is chaired by Jaehoon Chang, Vice Chair of Hyundai Motor Group.
I'd put it differently
There's something honest in this admission. For years Boston Dynamics sold us spectacle, because spectacle sells investors and clips - but the company itself knew that better than anyone. Now, under the roof of a car conglomerate with real assembly lines, it finally has a place to test whether the circus act holds up on a real shift.
What interests me is exactly that moment of truth: whether the robot survives the eighth hour on the line without falling. Elegance on camera is marketing, endurance is craft. From a design point of view, that's exactly where the toy and the tool part ways.