The technology behind robotics is evolving quickly. Certification, testing and regulation are evolving much more slowly.
Over the past two years, the robotics industry has been flooded with increasingly sophisticated demonstrations. Humanoid robots sort warehouse bins. Quadrupeds patrol industrial sites. Autonomous systems move through factories, hospitals and public spaces with growing confidence. The videos spread quickly online. Investors pour money into the sector. Founders race to deploy.
Then reality arrives in the form of testing labs, certifications, procurement departments, and regulators.
When Compliance Stops Being Optional
For many robotics startups, compliance remains an afterthought until it suddenly becomes unavoidable.
“[Founders are] also handling sales, engineering, everything that’s typically handled by founders in a startup, while also trying to do compliance,” said Tony Gao, founder of Fuchsia (YC P26) , a Y Combinator-backed startup focused on hardware compliance workflows.
Gao is part of a younger generation of founders entering one of the oldest and slowest-moving layers of the hardware industry: regulation. While robotics startups iterate in weeks, compliance systems often operate on timelines built around industries that evolved over decades.
For outsiders, “hardware compliance” can sound abstract. In practice, it governs whether products can legally and safely enter markets at all. Depending on the product and region, companies may need FCC certification, UL testing, CE marking, environmental testing, electrical safety verification, materials analysis or functional safety reviews before products can be deployed or sold.
Medical devices face especially strict requirements. Industrial robotics systems increasingly face scrutiny as deployments scale into environments where humans and machines work side by side.
Before the Product Can Ship
“The bottleneck there is actually before any sales or customer conversations really start happening,” Gao explained while discussing medical hardware certification timelines. Some approvals can take months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars before products ever reach customers.
Robotics companies often delay thinking about compliance because the industry itself is still immature. Standards are evolving. Regulators are still adapting to entirely new categories of machines. Many startups can prototype rapidly long before they understand what certification pathways may eventually be required.
That uncertainty creates risk.
“I’ve talked to a few robotics companies who have really been impacted by regulators because they don’t expect them to come in,” Gao said. “When they do come in and the company is unprepared, it can really mess things up.”
Sometimes the consequences are expensive. Companies may need to redesign hardware, replace components, alter manufacturing plans or repeat testing cycles that slow deployments and strain already tight startup budgets.
The contrast between prototypes and deployable products became a recurring theme throughout the conversation.
When Startups Hit Reality
Early-stage robotics teams often optimize for speed. Founders source inexpensive components, iterate quickly and focus on demonstrating capability. But scaling introduces an entirely different layer of constraints involving supply chains, safety standards, testing requirements and manufacturing consistency.
“The supply chain and the regulatory side is really the difference between a hobby prototype and something that can ship at scale,” Gao said.
That distinction matters more as robotics moves from controlled demonstrations into real-world environments.
The regulatory landscape itself is also shifting geopolitically. Gao pointed to recent FCC moves phasing out Chinese testing labs for U.S.-bound hardware certification, a change that could ripple through global supply chains and hardware manufacturing relationships.
Especially in robotics, many American and European companies still rely heavily on Chinese-produced hardware and manufacturing ecosystems. Changes to certification pathways could force companies to rethink where products are tested, manufactured and assembled.
Why Startups Enter the System Cold
At the same time, startups remain at a structural disadvantage compared to larger corporations.
Established companies already have internal compliance teams, long-standing relationships with testing labs and years of institutional experience navigating certification systems. Younger startups often approach those systems cold while simultaneously trying to manage engineering, fundraising, hiring and deployment timelines.
That imbalance is part of what Gao believes needs to change.
Fuchsia positions itself as an “AI-native” compliance service that uses AI agents to automate documentation workflows, standards cross-referencing and lab preparation while still keeping human experts involved in final approvals. The company’s goal is not to replace regulatory expertise entirely, but to reduce the operational drag that slows hardware startups trying to reach market.
The broader question extends beyond one startup.
Beyond the Demo
As robotics accelerates, the industry is beginning to encounter the same institutional friction that aviation, automotive and medical hardware faced before it. Safety standards, liability concerns, procurement requirements and certification systems eventually arrive for every emerging technology that enters the physical world.
The difference is that robotics is still early enough for many of those systems to remain undefined.
“There’s not really any precedent,” Gao said while discussing robotics regulation. “There’s no clear standard or path for certification.”
That uncertainty may sound bureaucratic. In reality, it is becoming a deployment problem.
Because eventually, every robotics company reaches the same question: not whether the robot works in a demo, but whether it can survive contact with the real world.
As Gao puts it: ““What I really want to see is all these robots, all these demos in the real world.”
#Robotics #Hardware #PhysicalAI #Startups
