Tether eyes lead role in major Neura Robotics funding round

Neura builds cognitive, human-scale robots aimed first at industrial deployments and, over time, home settings. The prospective financing comes as Neura lines up large manufacturing partners and volume commitments, including a plan announced this month with Schaeffler to integrate several thousand humanoids into production lines by 2035, strengthening the commercial backdrop for a raise of this size.

The round is being arranged with support from Morgan Stanley and follows Neura’s earlier €120 million funding this year. There is growing investor appetite for “frontier” AI hardware platforms that promise large addressable markets if unit economics improve at scale. Tether’s participation would mark one of the biggest single checks from a crypto-native balance sheet into European robotics. 

For Tether, the talks extend a push to diversify beyond stablecoin issuance into AI, robotics, and other infrastructure bets. The company generated record profit last year from its U.S. Treasury holdings and has deployed capital into more than 140 ventures, creating capacity for outsized private-market deals relative to traditional crypto investors. Executives have publicly described a view of an economy shared by “trillions of AI agents, billions of robots, and humans,” a rationale that positions robotics as an adjacent pillar to digital assets and machine-to-machine payments.

Deal contours and use of proceeds were not disclosed in detail, but the size points to manufacturing scale-up, supply-chain tooling, and working capital to fulfill early enterprise deployments. Neura has framed its roadmap as building toward an “iPhone moment” for general-purpose humanoids, with a stated ambition to produce 5 million of units by the end of the decade.

If completed, the financing would add to a run of jumbo rounds for humanoid and manipulation platforms in 2025 and place a European champion in a field crowded by U.S. rivals. For Tether, a lead role would deepen its portfolio beyond financial primitives into physical-world automation — an area that could intersect with crypto payment rails if robots transact autonomously or manage inventory with tokenized systems. For Neura, it would fund production and delivery against named industrial opportunities while preserving optionality for later strategic or public-market paths.