Humanoid News
Latest Humanoid news, funding rounds and robotics & AI coverage. $152M raised. 20 articles tracked by The Robotics Media.
About Humanoid
Humanoid (legally SKL Robotics Ltd.) is a London-based company that designs and manufactures humanoid robots for industrial use in logistics, manufacturing, and retail environments. The company was founded in 2024 by Artem Sokolov, who initially self-funded the venture with personal capital.
Its core product is the HMND 01 platform, offered in wheeled and bipedal configurations, which uses a proprietary AI software stack called KinetIQ to control perception, planning, and manipulation for industrial tasks such as pick-and-place operations. The company has run pilot deployments of its wheeled robot in factory settings, including with Siemens.
In July 2026 Humanoid raised a $152 million Series A led by Prime Movers Lab, with participation from Robert Bosch, Schaeffler, Fubon Financial Holding Venture Capital and Aglaé Ventures, valuing the company at $1.35 billion and making it one of Europe's first humanoid-robotics unicorns. Bosch also serves as a manufacturing partner for the HMND 01, and Schaeffler has placed an order for robots as part of the funding agreement.
Key facts
Products by Humanoid
- HMND 01 Alpha Wheeled (Robot, 2026) — A wheeled industrial humanoid robot with a 15kg payload and roughly four hours of runtime, used for pick-and-place tasks.
- HMND 01 Alpha Bipedal (Robot, 2026) — A bipedal variant of the HMND 01 platform designed for industrial deployment.
- KinetIQ (Software) — A proprietary AI framework built on NVIDIA compute that controls perception, planning and fleet orchestration for HMND 01 robots.
Funding rounds
- Series A — $152M — 2026 — led by Prime Movers Lab
Latest Humanoid news
- Physicl Raises $10 Million to Fix Physical AI's Edge-Case Data Problem — Paris-based Physicl raised a $10 million seed round to build synthetic training data that targets the specific scenarios where physical AI models fail...
- Theseus Robotics' Theo Promises 400 Shelf Restocks an Hour, No Retrofit Required — YC-backed Theseus Robotics exited stealth with Theo, a wheeled-humanoid system that claims to restock supermarket shelves overnight at up to 400 units...
- UniX AI Raises $70.5M Pre-Series A to Scale Humanoid Robots for Hotels and Retail — Shenzhen-based UniX AI raised 500 million yuan, about $70.5 million, to scale its Wanda and Panther humanoid robots, already shipping over 100 units a...
- Darwin Robotics Raises $3.6M to Build Robot Technicians for Data Centers — Y Combinator-backed Darwin Robotics landed a $3.6M pre-seed round to build robots that install, commission and maintain data center hardware, targetin...
- AL.Robot's $35M Kosdaq IPO Shows Where the Humanoid Boom's Real Money Sits — South Korean sensor maker AL.Robot drew 871-to-1 institutional demand for its Kosdaq listing, a sign investors see component suppliers to collaborativ...
- Blurry Camera Feeds Pushed AI Models to Attempt Unsafe Robot Actions 88% of the Time, Study Finds — Robocurve's RoboSpoof study found five frontier AI models attempted knife, bleach and electrical hazards on a real robot arm far more often when camer...
- Amazon Builds a New Robotics Team Around Fauna's Sprout, Five Years After Astro's Flop — Amazon has formed a Personal Robotics Group staffed with Astro veterans and an MIT roboticist, hiring for a secretive new home robot built on Fauna's...
- URobotics Raises $33.5M to Put Its Mobility Kit on Humanoids and Quadrupeds — A KAIST spinoff's modular E-DONG-KIT lets any robot judge rough terrain on its own. The Series A values the company at 10 times its seed round on the...
- South Korea's KIST Builds KAPEX Humanoid With 90% Domestic Parts, Hands Tech to LG — KIST's Lee Jong-won wins Korea's November science award for KAPEX, a humanoid built with over 90% domestic components, now being commercialized by an...
- Diden Robotics' Spider Climbs Steel Ship Hulls With Magnetic Feet to Weld and Inspect — South Korean startup Diden Robotics showed its Spider quadruped climbing vertical steel ship walls at RoboWorld 2026, carrying 30kg of welding and ins...
- Chery's AiMOGA Opens Mobo Home Robot Preorders, Betting Car Tech Transfers Straight Into Living Rooms — Chery's embodied-AI unit AiMOGA unveiled Mobo, a 22-degree-of-freedom home companion robot sharing its CheryMind AI foundation model with the automake...
- StarBot's $7,999 Spark Becomes North America's First US-Made Developer Humanoid Robot — Santa Barbara startup StarBot Robotics launched Spark, a 90-centimeter, 22-degree-of-freedom humanoid built entirely in the US and priced at $7,999 fo...
- GXO Expands Agility's Digit Humanoid to Two More Warehouses as 30-Plus Buyers Line Up — GXO will deploy Agility's Digit humanoid at sites in Statesville, North Carolina, and Lebanon, Tennessee, in early 2027, after Digit moved over 100,00...
- South Korea Opens Its First Humanoid Robot Data Factory, With 12 Robots Feeding a National AI Push — KIMM and ETRI opened a 12-robot facility on November 3 to generate training data for humanoid AI, part of Korea's K-Moonshot push to cut reliance on f...
- RobotWorld 2026 Pits Korea's Factory-Ready Robots Against China's Crowd-Pleasers — At RobotWorld 2026 in Goyang, Rainbow Robotics and other Korean makers pitched endurance and payload against China's Unitree, which drew crowds with d...
- Ottonomy Raises $4.2 Million to Push Delivery Robots Into Hospitals — Ottonomy closed a $4.2 million post-seed round led by Enrission India Capital to expand its Ottobot delivery robots into hospitals and industrial site...
- Rainbow Robotics' RBQ-10 Vaults Onto a 1-Meter Platform, Ahead of 2027 Mass Production — At RobotWorld 2026 in South Korea, Rainbow Robotics showed its 42kg RBQ-10 quadruped leaping onto a 1-meter platform after 30 units completed proof-of...
- Figure's Humanoid Robots Walk Out of BotQ, But Autonomy and Output Stay Unconfirmed — A new campus video shows Figure 03 humanoids leaving Figure AI's BotQ factory, but the company again withheld robot counts, autonomy details and updat...
- China's Robot Funding Falls 67% From Its Peak as Beijing Tightens IPO Standards — Chinese robotics investment fell to about $1.6 billion in October, down 67% from June's peak, after regulators told humanoid robot startups to show re...
- Xiaomi's Humanoid Robot Just Worked an 8-Hour Factory Shift Without Human Help — Xiaomi disclosed that its humanoid robot completed a full 8-hour shift on a car-parts sequencing line, while a separate home robot handled 50 tasks ac...