In 2014, Masayoshi Son stood on a Tokyo stage and unveiled Pepper — a wide-eyed white humanoid he called the world's first robot that could read human emotions. He was not pitching a gadget. He was pitching a new era, one where SoftBank would lead the way as robots moved from …

In November 2017, a five-foot robot named Mitra greeted Ivanka Trump and chatted with Narendra Modi at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Hyderabad. It was the kind of moment a founder cannot buy — national press, a viral clip, India's own humanoid robot sharing a stage with world leaders.

Nine years …