Tether has committed €70 million (approximately $81.6 million) to Generative Bionics, an Italian humanoid robotics startup spun out of the Italian Institute of Technology in 2024. The investment, announced as part of a wider funding round, positions the stablecoin issuer at the center of a push into “Physical AI” and industrially oriented humanoid systems.
Deal and company background
Generative Bionics emerged from research at the Italian Institute of Technology and inherits work across more than 60 humanoid prototypes, including the iCub and ergoCub platforms. The startup plans to unveil its first humanoid at CES, signaling a move from laboratory demonstrators toward marketable robots for industrial and human-centric environments. The funding round that includes Tether is led by CDP Venture Capital’s AI fund and is explicitly aimed at accelerating development of advanced humanoid robots and integrated physical-AI systems.
The €70 million figure is presented alongside a broader buying-in by a single tech treasury: Tether, which reported roughly $10 billion in profits in the first nine months of 2025, and has outlined a $5 billion investment plan for 2025. That plan is organized across five strategic pillars — finance, power, data, education and “evolution” — with the Generative Bionics stake falling under the latter.
Strategic context and risk implications
Tether’s entry into robotics forms part of an aggressive diversification program. Reported activities tied to the same strategy include talks to lead a €1 billion funding round for a German robotics firm, a $420 million acquisition of Nvidia GPUs to build cloud AI infrastructure, a $775 million strategic investment in a media platform, and expansion into gold mining and other blockchain projects. Together, these moves recast the company from a stablecoin issuer into a diversified technology investor with exposure to chip supply, AI infrastructure and hardware startups.
This repositioning raises multiple compliance and risk questions for institutional observers. Stablecoins have been subject to regulatory scrutiny over reserve transparency and systemic exposure; the investment strategy leverages a substantial treasury to underwrite long-duration, capital-intensive hardware and AI projects. The combination of opaque reserve concerns and large direct investments can alter counterparty and concentration risk profiles for counterparties and markets linked to the issuer.
Operationally, funding humanoid development accelerates timelines for robots designed for complex physical tasks. From a security and risk surface perspective, increased capital flows into integrated AI systems expand potential vectors: supply-chain dependencies on GPUs and specialized components; concentrated ownership stakes in early-stage hardware companies; and reputational exposure if funded projects encounter safety, standards or regulatory setbacks.
Tether’s €70 million investment in Generative Bionics anchors its stated pivot into physical AI and humanoid robotics, merging crypto treasury capital with capital-intensive hardware development. The move broadens the company’s risk footprint and invites closer scrutiny from compliance teams and regulators monitoring stablecoin-linked systemic exposure. Next verified milestone: Generative Bionics’ planned humanoid reveal at CES and any public filings or disclosures detailing Tether’s precise equity stake or governance rights in the funding round.