Exoskeletons

Market is materially smaller than 2020-2022 projections - Sarcos exit confirms

Exoskeleton revenue has compounded much more slowly than 2020-2022 industry projections implied. Global market revenue sat at ~$590M in 2025 and reaches only ~$694M in 2026 - a fraction of the $5-10B 2025 projections published a decade earlier. The structural confirmation of the slow compounding came in late 2023 when Sarcos Robotics (one of the highest-profile industrial-exoskeleton companies, Series B+ funded at $400M+) abandoned hardware entirely, pivoted to AI software, and rebranded as Palladyne AI in March 2024. Sarcos's exit was not a one-off - Ekso Bionics, long the leading medical-exoskeleton operator with ~17% share and FDA-cleared devices, completed its combination with Applied Digital's spun-out cloud business on 5 May 2026, becoming ChronoScale (Nasdaq: CHRN) with the former Applied Digital contributor holding ~97%; the exoskeleton operation is now a non-core subsidiary inside an AI-compute company. The category is fundamentally smaller than the augmentation-category narratives implied, and the surviving operators are concentrating on narrow medical rehabilitation use cases rather than mass industrial deployment.

State of the art (2026)

As of mid-2026 the category remains a sub-$1bn global niche, far below the $5-10bn projections of the early 2020s. The defining structural events confirm slow compounding: Sarcos abandoned exoskeleton hardware in late 2023 and rebranded as Palladyne AI, and in May 2026 Ekso Bionics was absorbed into Applied Digital's cloud business, renamed ChronoScale (Nasdaq: CHRN), leaving its exoskeletons as a non-core subsidiary. The live growth lever is medical: Wandercraft's self-balancing EVE is targeting a 2026 US launch on a $75M Series D, with CMS Medicare coverage the pivotal catalyst. Meanwhile Figure 03's commercial BMW Spartanburg deployment signals humanoids encroaching on the industrial-augmentation case exoskeletons once owned.

Self-balancing medical exoskeletons + reimbursement are the remaining commercial-growth lever

The remaining commercial-growth opportunity for the category is medical / rehabilitation - specifically self-balancing exoskeletons for spinal-cord-injury, stroke, and multiple-sclerosis patients, combined with progressing Medicare and private-insurance reimbursement. Wandercraft's EVE - launching in 2026 on the back of a $75M Series D round closed June 2025 - is the first self-balancing personal exoskeleton designed for home and outdoor use, hands-free, using NVIDIA AI for control. CE Marking opens European market access. CMS Medicare coverage determination for powered lower-limb exoskeletons through 2027 is the single highest-leverage reimbursement catalyst. If both EVE achieves commercial uptake and Medicare reimbursement extends, the medical-exoskeleton subcategory could compound faster than the broader exoskeleton market through 2027-2029.

Humanoid robots are the structural displacement risk for industrial use cases

The industrial / workplace exoskeleton tier faces a structural displacement risk through 2027-2030: humanoid robots (Apptronik Apollo + Google DeepMind Gemini Robotics partnership; Agility Robotics Digit at GXO and Toyota Canada; Figure 03 at BMW; Tesla Optimus) reach commercial scale at unit-cost economics that could absorb most warehouse-handling and logistics use cases. Where an industrial exoskeleton augments a human worker at $5,000-20,000 per unit, a humanoid robot replaces the human entirely at a unit cost trajectory heading toward $30,000-50,000 per robot by 2028-2030. For repetitive, structured industrial tasks (picking, packing, moving boxes), the humanoid replaces the worker rather than augmenting them - which collapses the industrial-exoskeleton TAM for those use cases. The exoskeleton category survives in ergonomically-difficult-for-humanoids tasks (highly variable terrain, awkward construction-site postures, defence load-bearing) and in medical rehabilitation - both narrower than the broad industrial use case projections of 2020-2022.