PART I – 10 Ways to Play Robotics in 2026 | Deep Dive Reference

July 5, 2026

10 Ways to Play Robotics in 2026 — Part 1: The Enablers

A slide from ARK’s Big Ideas 2026 has been making the rounds, and a list of “10 robotics stocks” has been circulating on X alongside it. I’ve seen versions of this list shared thousands of times — and almost nobody sharing it has actually looked under the hood of these companies.

So I did. I went through all ten names, chart by chart, filing by filing, and fact-checked every claim. Two of them, as shared, are misleading enough that buying them blindly could cost you real money — one is a pending acquisition presented as done, and another isn’t even the company people think they’re buying. We’ll get to those.

But first, the framework. Robotics is not one trade. It’s a value chain: the brains and nervous system (edge AI silicon), the senses (lidar, vision, force sensing), the tools and test bench, and finally the deployed platforms — the robots themselves. The further down that chain you go toward the actual robot, the bigger the potential prize and the higher the failure rate. The enabler layer is where profitable businesses win no matter which robot brand wins. The platform layer is where fortunes get made and burned.

In this first part, I’m covering five names that sit mostly in that enabler layer — the companies selling the picks and shovels of physical AI.

In Part 2, we move down the chain into the platforms, including the two names where the popular narrative gets it wrong.

Let’s start.

1. TERADYNE ($TER) — The Test Layer + Cobots