Humanoid, a two-year-old London robotics startup, has raised $152 million in Series A funding at a $1.35 billion post-money valuation — a jump the company says makes it Europe’s first pure-play humanoid robotics unicorn. Prime Movers Lab led the round, with participation from German industrial giants Schaeffler and Bosch, Taiwan’s Fubon Financial Holding Venture Capital, and LVMH-backed Aglaé Ventures. The raise brings Humanoid’s total funding to $270 million since its founding in 2024 by CEO Artem Sokolov and chief product officer Sotirios Stasinopoulos.
What makes the round notable isn’t just the speed — going from founding to unicorn status in roughly two years, a pace Sokolov has said typically takes a decade — it’s the design bet underneath it. While most of the industry’s most visible humanoid robotics companies are racing to build bipedal, human-shaped machines that walk on two legs, Humanoid’s flagship product, the HMND 01, moves on wheels. The company’s reasoning is pragmatic rather than aesthetic: Sokolov argues that roughly 85 to 90% of real industrial use cases — moving parts between workstations, picking items off shelves, feeding a production line — don’t actually require legs, and a wheeled base is more energy-efficient and mechanically simpler than a bipedal one. It also sidesteps a regulatory problem that has quietly slowed legged humanoid deployment across the whole industry: there is currently no ISO industrial safety standard covering bipedal robots, because regulators haven’t worked out how to certify a machine that can fall over near a human worker. A wheeled platform, by contrast, can plausibly be CE-certified using safety standards that already exist for autonomous mobile robots and collaborative robots — meaning Humanoid expects its robots to be legally deployable on factory floors well before legged competitors clear the same regulatory bar. A legged version is reportedly still in development internally, but treated as a secondary bet rather than the company’s core product.
The more unusual part of the cap table is Bosch and Schaeffler’s dual role. Both are investors in the round, but they are also, simultaneously, Humanoid’s commercial partners in the most direct sense possible: Schaeffler is a customer with a stated order for 1,000 robots and also supplies parts, while Bosch is both a customer and the contract manufacturer lined up to build the robots at scale, reportedly with production capacity for 100,000 units over five years. That is a meaningfully different risk profile from most humanoid robotics startups, which are typically still selling investors on a future customer base rather than showing up to a Series A with a four-figure binding order and a manufacturing line already committed. Schaeffler chief executive Klaus Rosenfeld put the broader shift plainly: “Humanoid robotics is rapidly moving from a visionary concept to an industrial reality.”
Humanoid enters a crowded and fast-capitalizing field. In the US, Figure AI carries a $39 billion valuation and Tesla continues pushing its Optimus line; in China, Unitree has already shipped more than 5,500 units alongside rivals AgiBot and LimX; in Europe, Germany’s Neura Robotics raised $1.4 billion in June 2026 alone, with Agile Robots, Italy’s Oversonic, and Spain’s Pal Robots also competing for the same industrial customers. Global robotics funding is on pace to hit roughly $56 billion in 2026, nearly double the prior year, which means Humanoid’s job now is less about proving humanoid robots matter and more about proving its wheeled, faster-to-certify approach can out-execute rivals racing toward the same factory floors with a flashier, harder-to-regulate design.
Stasinopoulos has credited part of the company’s speed to what he calls a second-mover advantage: more than 50 of Humanoid’s employees came from Boston Dynamics, Sanctuary AI, Apptronik, and 1X — companies that spent years, and in some cases billions of dollars, learning the hard way which design choices actually survive contact with a real factory floor. Humanoid has already run nine proof-of-concept projects across logistics, manufacturing, and retail, with beta robots scheduled to launch in the fourth quarter of this year and commercial pilots planned for late 2026, alongside software partnerships with SAP, Nvidia, and Siemens layered on top of its own four-part KinetIQ control platform.
What This Means for Philippine Founders
The Philippines has meaningful direct stakes in how this plays out, since electronics manufacturing, business process outsourcing, and logistics — three of the industries Humanoid is explicitly targeting — are also three of the country’s largest employers. A wheeled industrial robot that reaches commercial deployment years before legged competitors clear regulatory hurdles is a nearer-term automation risk, and for the right operators an opportunity, for Philippine manufacturing and logistics floors than the more distant, headline-grabbing bipedal robots most coverage focuses on. For Philippine founders specifically, the sharper lesson is in how Humanoid structured its round: rather than chasing the maximal, hardest-possible technical target first, it chose the version of the product that could legally ship and get paid for soonest, then used binding orders from its own investors to de-risk the raise. A Philippine hardware or robotics-adjacent startup — in agritech automation, warehouse robotics for the country’s fast-growing e-commerce logistics sector, or manufacturing tooling — would be well served by the same discipline: solve the regulatory and commercial path first, and let ambition scale up once revenue and safety certification already exist, rather than the reverse.
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