Boston Dynamics sells to Hyundai Motor Group in $1.1 billion deal

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  Meet Spot, the robodog. [credit: Boston Dynamics ]

 

Fresh off of selling ARM to Nvidia for $40 billion, Softbank is again divesting itself of a flashy company. This time it's selling Boston Dynamics, the state-of-the-art robotics company, to Hyundai Motor Group. Hyundai is acquiring an 80 percent stake in Boston Dynamics in a deal valuing the company at $1.1 billion. Softbank will retain a 20 percent stake.

Boston Dynamics was spun out of MIT as a private company in 1992 and survived for a long time on military contracts. The company became famous by sharing its work on its YouTube channel, where the better-than-sci-fi robot footage would reliably go viral. Google bought Boston Dynamics in 2013 with a plan to build a robotics division, but as Google is wont to do, it lost interest in robotics and decided to sell the company to Softbank in 2017. Softbank had an even shorter fling with Boston Dynamics than Google, and it was forced to sell the company after its investments in Uber, WeWork, and the now-dead satellite-broadband provider OneWeb tanked. Hopefully, this sale means Boson Dynamics has finally found a stable home.

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