Humanoid Raises $152 Million At $1.35 Billion Valuation: Europe’s Newest Robot Unicorn

2-year-old UK startup Humanoid has raised $152 million at a $1.35 billion valuation. Here is the company's HMND 01 humanoid robot.

Humanoid

Europe has a new billion-dollar startup, and it’s Humanoid, a two-year-old company headquartered in London that developed its humanoid robot, HMND 01, in near-record time. Today, London-based Humanoid announced that it has raised a $152 million Series A at a $1.35 billion post-money valuation. The funding comes just months after the company signed a 1,000-robot deal with Schaeffler and secured production capacity, backed by Bosch, that would enable the production of 100,000 units over the next five years.

“In just two years, we’ve gone from an idea to becoming Europe’s first pure-play humanoid robotics unicorn, partnered with some of the world’s leading industrial companies and built one of the strongest pipelines in the industry," Artem Sokolov, founder and CEO of Humanoid, said in a statement. “What we’ve accomplished in such a short time would typically take a decade.”

Sokolov credits that speed to market to his “extraordinary team.”

Humanoid has hired more than 50 veterans from Boston Dynamics, Sanctuary AI, Apptronik and 1X, Humanoid’s chief product officer Sotirios Stasinopoulos told me last month in London. "We used to call it the second-mover advantage," he said: the ability to distill lessons other companies “had to pay millions or billions of dollars to learn.”

The funding round brings Humanoid’s total funding to $270 million, and was led by Prime Movers Lab, with participation from German industrial giants Schaeffler and Bosch – both also Humanoid customers – as well as Taiwan’s Fubon Financial Holding Venture Capital. Aglaé Ventures, the investment vehicle backed by LVMH’s Arnault family, also participated in the round. LVMH is Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the French multinational behind Louis Vuitton, among other iconic brands such as Fendi and Bvlgari.

For the past three years, the story of humanoid robots has been told mostly in China and the United States. Figure AI in California has a $39 billion valuation, Tesla is retooling production lines for its Optimus robot, and in China, Unitree just cleared its path to a public listing after shipping more than 5,500 robots last year, with rivals like AgiBot and LimX raising nine figures at a time. Of the roughly $56 billion that has flowed into robotics companies in 2026 — nearly double last year's total — the overwhelming majority has landed in those two countries.

But now, with Humanoid joining Neura Robotics, which raised $1.4 billion in June, and other European humanoid robot companies in the mix like Agile Robots, Italy’s Oversonic, and Spain’s Pal Robots, there’s significant momentum in Europe.

"Now is a defining moment for the European technology ecosystem," Humanoid said in announcing the round, arguing that the UK and continental Europe "can produce and scale globally competitive humanoid robotics companies."

Zia Huque, general partner at Prime Movers Lab, said that he expects "the field to consolidate around a handful of category leaders across the US, Europe, and China."

Betting on wheels and legs

Where Humanoid diverges from some other humanoid robot companies — including its bipedal European neighbors — is an industrial product with wheels.

"More than 85 or 90% of the use cases can be covered by a wheel-based platform," Stasinopoulos told me during a walkthrough of the company’s London offices earlier this month. Wheels, he argued, are more energy-efficient, offer greater reach and, critically, can actually be certified for sale in Europe.

That last point is important.

"There’s no ISO at this stage that can cover bipedal technology for industrial frameworks, because at any time you may fall," Stasinopoulos said. Jeff Burnstein, who has spent more than four decades at the Association for Advancing Automation in the United States, recently told me basically the same thing: there is no bipedal humanoid robot safety standard yet.

Wheeled humanoids, by contrast, can be certified today by borrowing from two existing regimes: the autonomous mobile robot (AMR) framework and industrial collaborative-robot standards. Stasinopoulos says Humanoid can achieve CE certification by next year with HMND 01, its wheeled platform.

The company is also developing a legged humanoid robot, but it spending most of its development energy on the wheeled version for now.

Humanoid says it has already run nine proof-of-concept projects across logistics, manufacturing and retail in the past year, with a tenth underway and plans to begin longer three-to-six-month commercial pilots at customer sites starting late this year, using a "Beta" robot due in Q4. It has also announced partnerships with SAP, Nvidia, Bosch and Siemens, and the big deal with Schaeffler to deploy potentially thousands of robots.

"This funding gives us the resources to move even faster and to turn humanoid robots from breakthrough technology into everyday industrial tools,” CEO Sokolov said.

A four-layer brain, mostly built in-house

The other thing Humanoid offers is software.

Its AI platform, KinetIQ, is structured as four stacked layers. At the top sits an agentic fleet coordinator that ingests tasks from a customer’s warehouse-management or ERP system and distributes them across available robots based on their location, charge and — since the grippers are modular — their current capabilities. Below it, an off-the-shelf vision-language model breaks each task into a deterministic, checkable workflow, and below that, Humanoid’s proprietary model executes the discrete steps. Finally, a whole-body controller handles the actual robot movements.

The design goal is fleets that act in concert, not single machines that have to be managed individually.

That 4-layer brain works with the hardware to hit roughly 80% of human speed on some tasks. Humanoid expects to approach and eventually exceed parity.

A deployable industrial technology?

While the industry’s not totally there yet, Humanoid foresees a time soon when humanoid robots are “a deployable industrial technology.”

“Humanoid robotics is rapidly moving from a visionary concept to an industrial reality," says Klaus Rosenfeld, CEO of Schaeffler, which has also invested in Neura Robotics. "We are actively backing one of the most exciting frontiers in technology."

Bosch, which is also both a partner and now an investor, agrees.

“We see significant growth opportunities in the field of humanoid robotics,” Mathias Pillin, CTO of Robert Bosch GmbH, said in a statement. “Bosch will act as Humanoid’s contract manufacturing partner, while also providing strategic consulting and technical expertise in hardware design, production and supply chain.”

The goal of this financing, says Humanoid, is to “accelerate the transition toward a future where intelligent robots work safely alongside people across the world’s industrial economy.”

The company has achieved a significant amount with the $118 million it had already raised pre-Series A. Now it has significantly more to demonstrate the reality of its promise.