Qualcomm agrees to buy the company behind MoveIt in the Qualcomm PickNik deal, with no price stated

Qualcomm Technologies said on September 23, 2026 that it has agreed to acquire PickNik Inc., the Boulder, Colorado company that leads the open-source MoveIt motion planning software for robot arms. The Qualcomm PickNik announcement gives no price, and it says the closing “is subject to customary closing conditions.” Qualcomm’s release says it “intends for MoveIt to remain open-source under its existing license”. We read that licence in the project’s own repository on October 5: it is the BSD 3-Clause licence, and the copyright line names Willow Garage, not PickNik. We have not run MoveIt, MoveIt Pro or any Qualcomm board, so every claim about the software below is the companies’ own.

Takeaway points

• Qualcomm Technologies announced on September 23, 2026 that it has agreed to acquire PickNik Inc., and its release states no price and no closing date.
• Qualcomm’s release says it intends for MoveIt to stay open source under its existing licence, and the release does not mention the MoveIt name, which the project’s site says is a registered trademark of PickNik Inc.
• We have not tested MoveIt or MoveIt Pro on any hardware, and PickNik’s figures for the size of the project do not match the counts GitHub returned to us on October 5.

What did Qualcomm agree to buy, and what is the Qualcomm PickNik price?

Qualcomm agreed to buy the whole of PickNik Inc., and no primary document we found states a price. The release on Qualcomm’s newsroom, dated September 23, calls PickNik a “longtime steward of MoveIt” and says the deal is meant to strengthen Qualcomm’s commitment to an open robotics ecosystem. It gives no amount, no closing date and no word on what happens to PickNik’s staff or its Boulder office. The Robot Report, a trade outlet, also wrote that the amount was not specified. Qualcomm’s wording on timing is one sentence: “The closing of this transaction is subject to customary closing conditions.”

PickNik sells a commercial product on top of the free software. Its history page says the company was founded in 2015, with Google as its first customer, and worked mainly as an engineering services firm until 2021, when it began building a product called MoveIt Studio. The same page says the product was renamed MoveIt Pro in 2024. PickNik’s questions page says a runtime licence for MoveIt Pro is required for every physical robot, and that an annual licence stops working if it is not renewed. The release says MoveIt, MoveIt Pro and future PickNik technologies “are poised to become more closely integrated with Dragonwing robotics platforms”. Dragonwing is a Qualcomm processor brand.

Two PickNik executives are quoted in the release: Dave Coleman, founder and chief product officer, and Dave Grant, chief executive officer. For Qualcomm the speaker is Nakul Duggal, whose title in the release covers automotive, industrial and embedded IoT, and robotics. He says “software is the connective tissue that turns great hardware into great robots”.

Will MoveIt stay open source after Qualcomm buys PickNik?

Qualcomm says it intends to keep it open, and the two companies word that differently. Qualcomm’s release uses the language of intention: the company “intends for MoveIt to remain open-source under its existing license with community-driven roadmaps and open resources.” It also says Qualcomm “intends to continue supporting MoveIt across third-party hardware providers.” Mr Coleman’s post on PickNik’s blog, published the same day, states it as settled. Under the heading “What is not changing” he writes: “MoveIt 1 and 2 stays open source under its existing license, with community-driven roadmaps.”

Our reading is that an intention in a press release is not a binding term, and neither document says what would hold Qualcomm to it. Neither document sets a period for the commitment. The licence itself is a separate matter, covered next.

What licence does MoveIt use, and who controls the MoveIt project?

MoveIt uses the BSD 3-Clause licence, and day to day control sits with a group of maintainers that PickNik leads. We read the LICENSE.txt file in both main repositories, moveit and moveit2, on October 5. The two files are identical. Each begins “BSD 3-Clause License” and carries the line “Copyright (c) 2008-2013, Willow Garage, Inc.” The licence allows redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, under three conditions. Our reading is that code already published under those terms stays available under them whoever owns PickNik, and that the copyright line in the licence file does not name the company Qualcomm is buying.

The name is a different asset. The footer of the MoveIt project site reads “MoveIt is a registered trademark of PickNik Inc.” Qualcomm’s release does not mention the trademark.

On governance, the project’s About page says: “The primary governance of MoveIt takes place during the public monthly maintainer meetings through majority vote.” It adds that organisational leadership, outreach, publicity and additional maintenance are led by PickNik Robotics. The page lists 15 current maintainers, the only people who can merge changes. Five of them are listed with PickNik Robotics. The others are listed with universities, other companies or as independent consultants, and one has no affiliation shown. The moveit2 README says PickNik Inc is leading the development of MoveIt.

When we saved the MoveIt site’s home page and About page on October 5, neither contained the word Qualcomm. We found no statement from the maintainer group on the deal in the pages we read. A separate story on open-source robot software is Intrinsic releasing parts of its robot software platform as open source.

How big is MoveIt, and do PickNik’s figures match GitHub?

PickNik puts MoveIt at 40 repositories and more than 560 code contributors, and its repository count does not match what GitHub returned to us. Mr Coleman’s post says more than 560 people have contributed code, and that the project “spans 40 repositories, 6,700 GitHub stars, and 4,400 forks.” It says the two main MoveIt papers have been cited more than 1,700 times. The MoveIt home page says the software “has been used on over 150 robots”, while the blog post says thousands of robot models have been made to work with it. All of these are the makers’ claims.

We asked GitHub’s public interface for the MoveIt organisation’s repositories on October 5 and added up the results.

The gap may come from how PickNik counts. The post does not say which repositories it includes or when the count was taken. GitHub’s list of 56 includes 14 archived repositories and 2 forks of other projects, and leaving out the archived ones gives 42, which is still not 40. We cannot say which figure is right for the purpose PickNik had in mind. We could not check the contributor or citation figures.

The moveit2 repository received a push seven days after the announcement.

What does Qualcomm plan for MoveIt on Dragonwing and Arduino VENTUNO Q?

Qualcomm plans closer integration of MoveIt with its own Dragonwing chips and with Arduino boards, starting with the VENTUNO Q board that Arduino has put on pre-order. The release says developers building on Dragonwing “should benefit from first-class, optimized support” for MoveIt’s motion planning, manipulation, perception and kinematics. It says MoveIt integration with Arduino starts with VENTUNO Q boards and is aimed at “millions of developers”. It gives no date for either piece of work. Qualcomm announced its agreement to acquire Arduino in a release its newsroom files under October 2025.

Arduino’s product page for VENTUNO Q, which we saved on October 5, carries a pre-order button and no price in its text. It describes a board with a Qualcomm Dragonwing IQ8 processor, model IQ-8275, beside an STM32H5 microcontroller, with 16 GB of memory and 64 GB of storage. Arduino says the processor delivers 40 dense TOPS, a measure of AI computing throughput, and that the board supports ROS 2. Those are Arduino’s figures. We have not handled the board.

The release says the two companies would show MoveIt Pro running on VENTUNO Q and Dragonwing platforms at ROSCon in Toronto that week. That is a demonstration of the paid product. The release does not say whether the open-source MoveIt 2 was shown on the same boards.

Mr Coleman’s post gives PickNik’s reason for selling. He writes that AI models for robots need to run on the robot in real time within a power budget, which makes them joint software and hardware problems. The post also lists Arduino, Modular, Edge Impulse and Foundries.io as Qualcomm acquisitions. Both companies are founding members of the Open Source Robotics Alliance, the release says.

What has Qualcomm not said about PickNik and MoveIt?

Qualcomm has not published the price, the closing date or any binding form of its open-source commitment. Five things are missing from the documents we read:

• The amount paid and how it is paid.
• When the deal is expected to close, and which conditions apply beyond the word customary.
• Whether the MoveIt trademark, registered to PickNik Inc., passes to Qualcomm with the company or goes to a foundation.
• Whether MoveIt Pro’s licence terms and pricing change, and whether it will keep running on processors from other chip makers. The hardware promise in the release names MoveIt, not MoveIt Pro.
• Whether the maintainer group’s majority vote stays the way decisions are made once PickNik’s maintainers are Qualcomm employees.

Mr Coleman writes that “Qualcomm will continue investing in ROS and MoveIt”. The release puts no figure on that investment.

Onticpost has no robot hardware, so we have not tested MoveIt, MoveIt Pro, a Dragonwing platform or a VENTUNO Q board. This report rests on Qualcomm’s release, PickNik’s blog post and site, the MoveIt project site, Arduino’s product page, two licence files and GitHub data, all saved on October 5, 2026. For the business side of the robot makers that software like this serves, see Agility Robotics’ merger filing with Digit revenue and deployment figures.