About 175 to 225 workers in China, and an unspecified number in Japan and the U.S., will be laid off at the cloud robotics and AI startup after failed attempts at going public and a net loss of almost US$100 million in the six months ended June 2019. (Reuters)

Talking point: CloudMinds, founded in 2015 and based in Beijing and Santa Clara, Calif., had the majority of its workforce—about 700 employees—in China, where it makes most of its revenue. It had been aiming to put 100,000 of its cloud-based robots on the market by 2021. Akin to Rosie the maid from “The Jetsons,” the machines are intended to eventually be able to care for humans. SoftBank bankrolled the idea as part of a US$300-million round in March 2019; the conglomerate’s CEO, Masayoshi Son, has previously envisioned super-intelligent robots surpassing humans in number and brain power within three decades. A Frost & Sullivan report predicted there would be 42 million domestic-use service robots by 2019, and found that personal robots would be a US$19-billion market by this year. CloudMinds is now hoping to list in China after attempts to list in New York and Hong Kong failed.