Paris-based humanoid startup UMA has stepped out of stealth with a $40 million seed round and its first prototype, Northstar, positioning itself as Europe's first serious answer to Tesla's Optimus and Figure. The company was founded by former Tesla Optimus AI scientist Remi Cadene, and is backed by Greycroft, Relentless and Unity Growth alongside a marquee roster of angels including Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel and Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf.
From Optimus To LeRobot To Paris
Cadene spent roughly three years inside Tesla's Autopilot group, working on the AI systems that power both driver-assist and the Optimus humanoid, before leaving in early 2024 to join Hugging Face, where he led LeRobot, an open-source robotics library that has grown from zero to more than 12,000 GitHub stars in about a year. UMA is short for Universal Mechanical Assistant. Cadene co-founded the company at the end of 2025 with former Hugging Face engineer Simon Alibert and robot designer Rob Knight.
The Northstar Bet: Lightweight, European, Learn-From-Demo
UMA is deliberately targeting Europe as its first market rather than the US or China. Northstar is designed to weigh about 40 kilograms so it can safely operate alongside humans on factory floors and in logistics warehouses, and Cadene says it will be trained with real-time learning, picking up a new task from a single demonstration and improving with repetition. The company already claims a pipeline of 50 prospective customers evaluating industrial pilots this year, and Cadene frames the pitch around European labor costs and demographic pressure. "Labor costs are very high and, given the demographic trends, there will be significant demand," he said.
How UMA Stacks Up
UMA has no shipping product yet and its Version 0 prototype visibly lags Tesla's Optimus, Faraday Future's Futurist or Figure's second-generation robot on hardware. But it enters a race whose hardest problem is arguably software, and Cadene is one of the few founders who has shipped code into both a car-scale foundation model at Tesla and into open-source robotics infrastructure at Hugging Face. The company will join a European humanoid cohort that already includes Neura Robotics and Agility Robotics' listing partners.
What Comes Next
UMA says the $40 million seed will fund team expansion in Paris, deeper investment in Northstar's AI stack and the first commercial pilots. With Meta, Datadog and Hugging Face alumni on the cap table and a Cadene-Alibert engineering base, the number to watch is whether UMA can convert any of its stated 50-customer pipeline into paid industrial pilots before rivals such as UBTECH lock in European factories.
Reporting based on coverage from Electrek, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, TheNextWeb and UMA.