London-based robotics startup Humanoid has closed the first tranche of a Series A funding round worth roughly $150 million, valuing the maker of the HMND 01 industrial humanoid at $1.2 billion pre-money and pushing it into unicorn territory. Two sources briefed on the deal told The Information the company is targeting an additional $80 to $100 million by September to top up the round.
A UK-First Humanoid Unicorn
Founded in 2024 by serial entrepreneur Artem Sokolov — until now Humanoid's sole shareholder after seeding the company with roughly $30 million of his own capital — the startup, whose legal entity is SKL Robotics LTD, was already the fastest-growing humanoid maker in Europe. The Series A tranche makes it the first UK-headquartered humanoid company to reach unicorn status, and gives Sokolov headline capital to accelerate deployments of the HMND 01 Alpha Wheeled and Alpha Bipedal platforms into industrial customers already testing the robot on live sites.
What The Money Buys
Humanoid is running its intelligence stack on a proprietary VLM/VLA orchestration framework called KinetIQ, which it says lets a single fleet manager coordinate wheeled and bipedal robots across warehouses, retail back-of-house and manufacturing cells. The company has publicly disclosed pilots at Schaeffler and Siemens — the latter running 60 totes an hour in a live logistics trial earlier this year — and a supply-chain partnership with Bosch. Its cloud and AI infrastructure runs on NVIDIA.
The European Humanoid Race Widens
The raise lands in the middle of a humanoid capital rush that has now produced back-to-back mega-rounds in every geography: Neura Robotics closed a $1.4 billion Series C in Germany, LimX Dynamics locked in $200 million pre-IPO from Chinese and Middle Eastern investors, and Physical Intelligence is finalising $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation. Humanoid's tranche puts a UK entrant in the same shortlist.
Robots As A Service
Rather than selling units, Humanoid deploys HMND 01 through a robotics-as-a-service model — customers pay per unit-hour — a route also being taken by Agility Robotics with Digit and a growing share of Chinese suppliers. Analyst estimates for the addressable market for industrial humanoids remain wide: Goldman Sachs sees $38 billion by 2035, Morgan Stanley up to $5 trillion by 2050. Humanoid says it is targeting the industrial slice first before extending to consumer form factors.
Reporting based on coverage from The Information, Techmeme, The Robot Report and Humanoid's official newsroom.