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Entanglement is one of the best tricks in the quantum physics magic box, two particles that are inextricably linked when measured – a key component of potential advances in computing, communication, and sensing technologies.
Pure-play industrial robotics companies raised $1.56 billion over the past 24 months, but the top five deals captured 80.58% of that capital. Strip out rounds above $50 million and disclosed funding drops to $151.75 million, revealing that most industrial robotics companies are competing for a fraction of the money the headline number suggests.
Industrial robotics funding looks abundant until you look at who’s actually getting it. Between August 2024 and July 2026, pure-play industrial robotics companies raised $1.56 billion in disclosed capital across 19 equity deals and 16 unique companies, according to a New Market Pitch funding analysis. The top deal alone represents 31.97% of that total. The top five deals together account for 80.58%.
Remove rounds above $50 million from the dataset and disclosed capital falls from $1.56 billion to $151.75 million, according to the same analysis. That’s the real size of the market most industrial robotics companies are actually competing in. Industrial robotics funding at the top end is now dominated by a handful of platform bets large enough to make headlines on their own, while everyone else is raising within a much smaller, much more competitive band.
In 2006, Vernor Vinge published a novel in which a company digitizes a university library by destroying it. Books stripped from their bindings. Pages blown through the air, photographed in flight, reassembled as searchable data. The paper goes to pulp.
The novel is Rainbows End. Vinge set it in 2025.
He was off by a year.
Every #AI lab now wants text written before machines started writing, and that means old paper. So books get bought by the million, spines get sliced off, pages get fed through high-speed scanners, and the originals get discarded. Rare editions included. A US federal judge has already ruled the practice legal. Buy the book, destroy the book, keep the file.
Authors, archivists, and librarians have started organizing against it.
Vinge wrote it as a warning. The industry read it as a workflow.