companies

Boston Dynamics

Pioneering robotics engineering company, now owned by Hyundai, known for the Atlas humanoid and Spot quadruped robots.

Boston Dynamics was founded in 1992 as a spin-off from MIT and spent its first two decades primarily as a DARPA-funded research and defense contractor, building dynamically balanced legged robots years before humanoid and quadruped robotics became a commercial category. Ownership passed from Google in 2013 to SoftBank in 2017 to Hyundai Motor Group, which acquired an 80% stake in December 2020 for roughly $880 million and completed the deal in mid-2021; the company remains headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts. Spot, a four-legged inspection robot, became the company's first commercially available product in 2019 and has since become something close to an industry standard for remote inspection, deployed across oil and gas platforms, power plants, and construction sites, with well over a thousand units in the field. Atlas, Boston Dynamics' humanoid, spent years as a research platform known mainly for viral parkour and backflip videos before the company unveiled a fully electric, commercially oriented version aimed at industrial tasks; as of 2026 it's shipping to a small number of committed customers, with Hyundai's own factories and Google DeepMind among the first recipients. Under Hyundai, Boston Dynamics has announced a major expansion of its Waltham, Massachusetts operations, aiming to roughly double its local headcount as it scales toward higher-volume Atlas production.

Founded

1992

Headquarters

Waltham, United States

Sector

robotics