Nebius Robotics & Physical AI Awards

Nebius Robotics & Physical AI Awards celebrate emerging startups and scale-ups that use AI to shape the future of the industry.

Our mission is to showcase transformative technology, foster collaboration between founders, industry leaders and researchers and power the next generation of breakthroughs in AI.

Companies from the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom and Asia are invited to apply, with the winners announced at the Nebius Robotics and Physical AI Summit & Awards Ceremony at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA on December 9, 2025.

Selected winners will receive up to $150,000 in compute credits for Nebius AI Cloud, accelerated by NVIDIA AI infrastructure. One winner will also receive a strategic investment from Shanda Ventures.

Applications are collected by October 30, 2025!

Apply now

Award categories

A winner and a runner-up will be selected for each of the five following categories:

Foundation models, robot brains and runtime

Large-scale multimodal AI models, vision-language-action models and runtime infrastructure powering next-generation autonomous systems.

Data engines, synthetic data and simulation

Data platforms, synthetic data tools, simulation environments and digital twins enabling scalable training and validation.

Industrial robotics deployment and transformation

Large-scale deployments of robots across logistics, manufacturing, energy, healthcare and construction with measurable ROI and safety outcomes.

Vision AI and streaming video analytics

AI systems for video analytics in smart cities, industrial monitoring, safety and compliance.

Platforms for benchmarking, visualization and evaluation

Tools and frameworks that provide testing, compliance and shared standards for robotics and Physical AI.

Prizes

Grand prize winners for each of five category will be awarded $150,000 in high-performance AI compute on the Nebius AI Cloud, accelerated by NVIDIA AI infrastructure.

One winning company will also be selected for an additional $100,000 investment by Shanda Ventures.

Plus, all winners and finalists will benefit from global recognition and powerful introductions to investors and leaders in the field!

AI Cloud credits

$150,000 in high-performance credits on the Nebius platform.

VC connections and investment

$100,000 investment by Shanda Ventures and connect with our network of investors.

Media exposure and promotion

Gain visibility and press celebrating your selection.

Executive mentorship

Work 1:1 with a Nebius C-level expert following the event.

Robotics & Physical AI Summit

Finalists will participate in the Summit, gaining exposure through networking, panel discussions and direct interaction with judges and partners.

Trophies and SWAG

Take home a stunning memento of your victory + Nebius goodies.

Program timeline

September 16, 2025

Applications open

October 30, 2025

Applications close

November 6, 2025

Finalists announced

December 9, 2025

Summit and award ceremony

Qualification criteria

Technical innovation & excellence

Novelty and technical strength of the solution. Does it push boundaries in AI, robotics, simulation or infrastructure?

Real-world implementation & reliability

Product maturity and performance in practice: pilots, deployments, safety and compliance.

Market potential & ecosystem adoption

Demand and adoption pathways: customers, partnerships, open-source traction and scalability.

Problem-solution fit & responsible vision

How well the product solves real customer or industry pain points, with attention to safety and responsible practices.

Judging committee

The full judging panel with industry and academia experts will be announced soon.

Pierce Daly

Investor at Accel

Colton Dempsey

Partner at Next47

Amit Goel

Head of Robotics & Edge Computing Ecosystem at NVIDIA

Lior Ben Horin

Sr. Omniverse & Robotics DevRel Lead at NVIDIA

Spencer Huang

Robotics Product Lead at NVIDIA

Anu Maheshwari

Head of Venture Partnerships at Nebius

Daniel Mulet

Partner at Radical Ventures

Sumay Parikh

Inception N.A Lead for Physical AI Startups at NVIDIA

Ben Quazzo

Partner at Accel

Jai Sajnani

Partner at Khosla Ventures

Adam Scraba

Director of Product Marketing at NVIDIA

Alexey Tsishevski

Head of GTM for Physical AI & Robotics at Nebius

Thomas-Tianwei Wang

Lead AI Applications Engineer

Jianjun Wang

Senior Principal Scientist of Robotics Research at ABB

Mengyuan Yan

Member of Technical Staff for Robotics at OpenAI

FAQ

Applications open on September 16, 2025 and will close on October 30, 2025. Finalists will be announced 1-2 weeks after initial reviews are completed.

Yes. Please note that each application should focus on a singular product or service that your startup provides. During the application you will select the specific category for which you are nominating this product.

If submitting multiple applications, you may choose to apply the same product to multiple categories or submit multiple products to the same category. There is no limit to how many applications your company can submit, however, we strongly encourage a quality over quantity approach.

All applications will be screened by our in-house experts for overall quality and completeness. Incomplete or unclear applications may be filtered out of consideration, so put your best foot forward and keep answers and information as succinct as possible.

A panel of judges will then review all applications that match their own industry expertise, providing several scores based on the depth of innovation, breadth of implementation, demonstrated market potential and potential or realized impact of the technology. This will determine which applicants become finalists and receive initial recognition.

Last, a jury will review all finalists to determine winners and runners-up for each category.

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