Artificial Intelligence, Robotics

NEC invests in Dexmate, maker of the “VEGA” humanoid robot

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August 25, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

NEC Corporation’s NEC Orchestrating Future Fund has invested in Dexmate, a United States-based company founded in 2024 that is developing the humanoid robot “VEGA” alongside a complete Physical AI development platform. Dexmate aims to reduce obstacles to robot adoption by offering an integrated solution for development, configuration, and operation of AI-powered robots. “Dexmate’s humanoid robot ‘VEGA’ and integrated Physical AI development platform lower the barriers to robot development and deployment,” says Dexmate Co-Founder & CEO Tao Chen. Through this investment, NEC and Dexmate will explore opportunities to implement Physical AI across multiple industries.

NEC Orchestrating Future Fund Invests in Dexmate’s “VEGA” Robot

This funding signals an expansion of NEC’s focus beyond digital AI to robots interacting with the physical world. Demand for Physical AI applications has been limited by the complexity of integrating components such as sensors, control systems, and extensive training data, all of which contribute to adoption obstacles. Dexmate addresses this challenge by providing a unified system that streamlines the process from initial robot design to on-site operation.

NEC intends to combine Dexmate’s technology with its own expertise to explore collaborative opportunities and accelerate the implementation of Physical AI across multiple industries, the company says. Tao Chen, Dexmate Co-Founder & CEO, said, “We are honored to welcome the investment from the NEC Orchestrating Future Fund and deeply appreciate their confidence in our Physical AI technology.” This investment reflects NEC’s strategy of open innovation and co-creation with startups to generate new social value.

According to Shigeki Wada, NEC Corporate SVP, “Through dialogue with Dexmate, we aim to explore new possibilities for value creation in the Physical AI domain and, together with our partners, contribute to solving the challenges faced by customers and society.” The company emphasizes its commitment to shaping the future and intends to leverage technologies alongside cross-sector collaboration to achieve this goal. The NEC Orchestrating Future Fund includes participation from multiple investors who share NEC’s vision for future societal development.

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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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