Analysis
London-based Humanoid raised $152 million in a Series A led by Prime Movers Lab, with Schaeffler, Bosch, Fubon Financial Holding Venture Capital, and Aglae Ventures also participating. The round values the two-year-old company at $1.35 billion post-money, making it, by its own and multiple outlets' description, Europe's first pure-play humanoid robotics unicorn, and brings its total funding to $270 million since founding in 2024.
Rather than chase the bipedal, human-mimicking form factor pursued by Figure AI, Apptronik, and Tesla's Optimus program, Humanoid built its HMND 01 as a wheeled robot, betting that wheeled mobility offers better stability, speed, and payload capacity on factory floors than legs do, at least for the industrial and logistics use cases it's targeting first. The company says it already has a 1,000-robot order from Schaeffler and has secured production capacity from Bosch for up to 100,000 units, part of roughly 34,000 pre-orders worth nearly $2.5 billion.
The round lands in a red-hot humanoid and physical-AI funding environment: Figure AI, Apptronik, and China's Unitree have all raised large rounds over the past year, and Travis Kalanick's Atoms just closed a $1.7 billion round targeting adjacent industrial-AI territory. Humanoid's unicorn valuation on a $152 million Series A is aggressive even by that standard, reflecting investor eagerness to back anything that looks like it can turn robot pre-orders into shipped units.
What to watch: whether Humanoid can convert its pre-order backlog into deployed, revenue-generating robots on the late-2026 timeline it has set, and whether the wheeled-robot bet holds up against bipedal competitors as factory environments evolve to accommodate either form factor.
