Humanoid: Europe's First Humanoid Robotics Unicorn — Inside the $152M Series A and $1.35B Valuation

Funding & Valuation

• Series A: $152 million, announced July 21, 2026 .
• Led by: Prime Movers Lab .
• Participants: Schaeffler, Bosch, Fubon Financial Holding Venture Capital, and Aglaé Ventures (the investment vehicle of LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault) .
• Post-money valuation: $1.35 billion .
• Total funding to date: $270 million, including a founder-led pre-seed round and a $68 million seed round .
• Largest-ever Series A for a humanoid-first robotics company in Europe .

Technology: HMND 01 Alpha Robot Hardware

Humanoid's primary commercial robot is the HMND 01 Alpha Wheeled — a dual-armed mobile manipulator mounted on an omnidirectional wheeled base. It features 29 degrees of freedom, a 15 kg payload capacity, and a 4-hour runtime . The company chose wheels over legs for industrial environments where wheeled mobility is faster, more stable, and more reliable than bipedal locomotion . A bipedal variant, the HMND 01 Alpha Bipedal, is also in development for environments requiring stair navigation .

Technology: KinetIQ AI Platform

The robots are powered by KinetIQ, Humanoid's proprietary AI orchestration framework for end-to-end control of heterogeneous robot fleets . KinetIQ operates across four cognitive layers that run at different decision frequencies, from fleet-level task assignment down to millisecond-level joint control . The framework can coordinate wheeled robots, bipedal humanoids, and even non-humanoid robots simultaneously in industrial, service, and home environments . KinetIQ is built on NVIDIA compute and includes KinetIQ Ascend, which extends the platform with trial-and-error learning capabilities .

Target Industries

Humanoid focuses on manufacturing, logistics, and retail — aiming to address global labor shortages through practical, commercially scalable automation .

Strategic Partnerships

Humanoid has announced partnerships with several Fortune 500 and major industrial firms:

• SAP: Completed an automotive manufacturing logistics proof of concept with SAP and Martur Fompak .
• NVIDIA: Partnership for AI compute and simulation capabilities .
• Bosch: Strategic collaboration and Series A investor; Bosch Rexroth is providing automation components . Bosch and Humanoid have also agreed to manufacture and deploy HMND 01 robots for the European market .
• Siemens: Strategic partner confirmed in multiple sources .

Largest Commercial Agreement: Schaeffler

Humanoid's largest publicly announced commercial deal is with German motion-technology giant Schaeffler, signed on May 13, 2026 . Key terms:

• Scale: A binding, phased deployment agreement for a four-digit number (thousands) of wheeled HMND 01 Alpha units to be integrated across Schaeffler's global production network by 2032 .
• Near-term: An estimated 1,000–2,000 robots initially, with first units deployed in late 2026 at Schaeffler's facilities in Herzogenaurach and Schweinfurt, Germany .
• Model: Robot-as-a-Service (RaaS) subscription model .
• Strategic layer: Schaeffler became Humanoid's preferred supplier of actuators and motion components, covering over 50% of Humanoid's joint-actuator requirements for its wheeled platforms through 2031 .

Rollout & Manufacturing Plans

• Q4 2026: Beta robots begin deployment at Schaeffler customer sites, marking the first live production use of the HMND 01 Alpha Wheeled . Initial box-handling tasks are planned at Herzogenaurach, with a validation phase at Schweinfurt running through June 2027 .
• Mass manufacturing: The Series A proceeds are earmarked to scale manufacturing capacity toward producing 100,000 units over the next five years, with Bosch and Schaeffler providing supply-chain infrastructure .
• IPO target: Humanoid is contemplating a U.S. IPO in 2029 or 2030 .