Humanoid raises $152 million Series A at $1.35 billion valuation

Humanoid, a UK AI and robotics startup building wheeled humanoid robots for industrial settings, has raised a $152 million Series A at a $1.35 billion post-money valuation. The company said the financing brings its total capital raised to $270 million, a large early-stage funding total for a two-year-old robotics company in a category still proving whether deployments can scale beyond pilots.

The round was led by Prime Movers Lab, with participation from Schaeffler, Bosch, Fubon Financial Holding Venture Capital and Aglaé Ventures. Humanoid did not disclose revenue, headcount, unit economics or the structure of the round.

Humanoid is targeting manufacturing, logistics, retail and other industrial environments where companies are trying to offset labor shortages and automate physically repetitive work. The company’s machines are wheel-based rather than bipedal, a design choice that can reduce mechanical complexity in facilities built around flat floors, although Humanoid did not provide performance benchmarks or deployment metrics.

The company said it builds both its own robot hardware and an AI system called KinetIQ, which it describes as the software layer that lets its robots understand tasks, reason through them and carry them out in industrial facilities. That is the standard pitch across much of humanoid robotics: combine general-purpose hardware with AI control systems, then sell into sectors where labor supply and productivity pressures are acute. Humanoid did not say how much of KinetIQ is deployed with paying customers today.

Humanoid said it has partnerships with SAP, NVIDIA, Bosch and Siemens, and described those customers as Fortune 500 companies. It also said it recently signed what it called the industry’s largest publicly announced commercial agreement with Schaeffler, covering the planned deployment of thousands of humanoid robots in manufacturing settings. The company did not disclose the value, timing, contractual obligations or deployment milestones tied to that agreement.

Founder and CEO Artem Sokolov said the company has moved from concept to what he called Europe’s first pure-play humanoid robotics unicorn in two years. He said the new funding would help Humanoid turn the technology into regular industrial equipment rather than one-off demonstrations.

Zia Huque, a general partner at Prime Movers Lab, said the investor expects humanoid robotics to consolidate around a limited number of leaders across the U.S., Europe and China, and said Humanoid could become one of the European companies in that group. Fubon Financial Holding Venture Capital said Humanoid has shown fast execution and pointed to industrial deployments as the basis for its support.

What Humanoid says it will fund

• Development and launch of a next-generation humanoid robotics platform.
• Longer commercial deployments at customer sites in logistics, manufacturing, retail and other sectors.
• Rollout of beta robots beginning in the fourth quarter of 2026.
• Start of mass manufacturing for wheel-based humanoid robots.
• Further AI and software development for KinetIQ, with the stated goal of building a general-purpose industrial robot.

The round gives Humanoid more capital to compete in an expensive hardware category where factory readiness, service costs and production capacity matter as much as AI claims. The company has now put a 2026 marker on broader beta deployments; the harder proof will be whether those robots operate at scale in customer facilities under commercial terms Humanoid has yet to disclose.

This story draws on original reporting from Tech.eu.