Boston Dynamics, Inc. — commonly "Boston Dynamics" — is a US robotics company founded in 1992 by Marc Raibert as a spin-off from MIT's Leg Laboratory, headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts. It is privately held and controlled by Hyundai Motor Group, which acquired an 80% stake from SoftBank in June 2021 at a ~$1.1B valuation; SoftBank's remaining minority stake was reportedly bought out in 2026, making Boston Dynamics a wholly owned subsidiary ahead of a planned IPO. Headcount is not officially disclosed; third-party sources place it around 1,000–1,300 employees. No public revenue figures are verified.
Products and operations. Boston Dynamics designs and sells legged and mobile robots: Spot, a quadruped used for industrial inspection, construction monitoring and public-safety work (commercially available since 2019–2020); Stretch, a box-handling robot for truck unloading and warehouse case handling; Atlas, an electric bipedal humanoid now in limited production and pilot deployment with partners including Hyundai manufacturing sites; and Orbit, its fleet-management/teleoperation software platform. Earlier machines (BigDog, Handle, hydraulic Atlas) were research and defense-funded programs.
Patent-litigation posture. Boston Dynamics is an operating company and appears in the database only as a defendant (0 plaintiff cases, 1 defendant case). That profile is characteristic of a product company defending against patent assertion, not of an NPE or two-way litigant.
Notable case. The sole tracked matter is Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. v. Turing Video et al. (D. Del.), in which Boston Dynamics was named a defendant. Cedar Lane Technologies is a Canadian NPE widely identified as a patent assertion entity by Unified Patents, Stanford's NPE Litigation Database, and KIPO analyses; it acquired portfolios originating with Intellectual Ventures and has filed hundreds of suits, mostly in W.D. Tex. and D. Del. The Boston Dynamics docket (1:22-cv-01410, filed October 26, 2022) asserted image-processing patents US 6,972,790 and 8,537,242 and was reported settled in late 2022. No substantive merits findings are asserted here.