Hyundai takes full control of Boston Dynamics as SoftBank exits for $325 million - Startup Fortune

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Jun 19, 2026 · 4:34 PM

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Hyundai takes full control of Boston Dynamics as SoftBank exits for $325 million

Hyundai Motor Group is acquiring SoftBank's remaining 9.65% stake in Boston Dynamics for $325 million, completing its full ownership of the robotics company. The deal closes as Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid robot enters commercial deployment and the broader humanoid race intensifies against Tesla Optimus and Figure AI. SoftBank exits to redeploy capital toward its $41 billion OpenAI bet and AI infrastructure.

Janet Harrison

Jun 19, 2026 · 10:38 AM ·<br>5 min read<br>987 views

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Hyundai's move to buy SoftBank's remaining 9.65% stake in Boston Dynamics for $325 million is not just cleanup from an old deal. It gives Hyundai full control of one of the few humanoid robotics companies with real factory work in sight.

Hyundai Motor Group is expected to approve the purchase on June 22, closing out SoftBank's last piece of Boston Dynamics and turning the Waltham, Massachusetts robotics company into a wholly owned Hyundai business. The price is $325 million for the remaining stake, according to the deal terms, and it follows the put option SoftBank retained when Hyundai bought control of Boston Dynamics in 2021.

You should read that as a signal, not a footnote. Hyundai paid about $880 million for an 80% stake in Boston Dynamics in the 2021 transaction, valuing the company at roughly $1.1 billion at the time. SoftBank had bought Boston Dynamics from Alphabet in 2017, after Google had acquired the robotics lab in 2013. It was a strange ownership path for a company whose robots became famous on YouTube long before they became obvious commercial products.

That part is changing. At CES in Las Vegas on January 5, 2026, Hyundai and Boston Dynamics showed the electric Atlas humanoid robot in public, with the Associated Press reporting that the life-sized robot stood up, walked around the stage and was remotely piloted for the demonstration. The useful detail was not the stagecraft. It was the deployment plan. A production version of Atlas is expected to begin work at Hyundai's electric vehicle plant near Savannah, Georgia, by 2028.

Boston Dynamics has spent years making robots that looked too good to be businesses. Spot, its four-legged robot, became the first obvious commercial success. Atlas is the harder test because humanoid robots have to justify themselves in places where traditional automation already exists. Business Insider reported in January that Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter said Atlas would need to learn new factory tasks in a day or two and reach 99.9% reliability before it could be truly useful on the floor. That's a high bar. It's also the right one.

Hyundai's advantage is that it doesn't have to imagine the first customer. It owns the factories, the vehicle programs and now the whole robotics company. The Verge reported from CES that Hyundai plans to start Atlas with parts sequencing at its Metaplant in Georgia, then move toward heavier and more complex operations by 2030. If you're building robots for the physical world, that kind of controlled deployment matters more than a perfect demo video.

The supply chain is part of the story too. Hyundai Mobis, the group's components arm, has been tied to actuator production for Atlas, which keeps one of the robot's most important hardware systems closer to Hyundai's own industrial base. Frankly, that is the difference between treating robotics as a side bet and treating it as a manufacturing capability. A humanoid robot is only as useful as the parts, service network and production discipline behind it.

The field around Boston Dynamics is no longer sleepy. Tesla has shifted part of its Fremont factory story toward Optimus after ending Model S and Model X production, a move reported by Axios and The Verge earlier this year. Figure AI has pushed humanoid robots into BMW factory trials. Unitree has made lower-cost humanoids impossible to ignore. None of those companies has Boston Dynamics' long record in locomotion, but they don't need to. They need to make robots cheap enough, useful enough and reliable enough to win specific jobs.

That is why full ownership matters for Hyundai. Boston Dynamics doesn't have to...