Selling hardware, leasing it, or using it yourself first
Several distinct business models are emerging across the industry, and they aren't mutually exclusive. The most straightforward is selling hardware outright, the way you'd sell any industrial equipment: a customer pays a purchase price and owns the robot. This is simple and familiar to industrial buyers, but it puts a large upfront cost and a lot of the reliability risk on the customer, which is a hard sell while the technology is still maturing quickly and could be outdated or improved on within a couple of years.
A second model, often described as 'robots as a service,' looks more like leasing or subscription: the customer pays an ongoing fee — sometimes tied to usage or uptime — rather than buying the hardware outright, and the robotics company retains ownership, responsibility for maintenance, and the ability to upgrade or swap hardware and software over time. This lowers the upfront cost and risk for the customer and can be a better fit for a technology that is still improving quickly, since the seller keeps the flexibility to iterate on hardware that's still deployed at the customer's site.