London robotics startup Humanoid raises $152M, Bosch to manufacture wheeled robots
▼ Summary
– London-based Humanoid raised $152 million in Series A funding led by Prime Movers Lab, reaching a valuation above $1 billion.
– Bosch will act as Humanoid’s contract manufacturer, providing hardware design, production, and supply chain expertise.
– Humanoid builds wheeled and bipedal robots on its HMND 01 platform, with a wheeled model completing an autonomous shift at a Siemens factory.
– The company claims 34,000 robot pre-orders worth nearly $2.5 billion, though this figure is unverified and dwarfs current industry revenue.
– Humanoid’s status as Europe’s first humanoid robotics unicorn is contested, with competitors like Neura Robotics and THEKER having higher valuations.
A London-based robotics startup has secured $152 million in Series A funding, a round that pushes its valuation past the billion-dollar mark and brings a major manufacturing heavyweight on board. The investment was led by Prime Movers Lab, the venture firm that also backed Figure AI at its $39 billion valuation. Additional participants included Bosch, Schaeffler, Aglaé Ventures (the investment arm of LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault), and Taiwan’s Fubon Financial. The company, Humanoid, has now raised a total of $270 million, despite being barely two years old and yet to ship a single commercial unit.
The true weight of this round, however, may not be the capital but the strategic manufacturing partnership that came with it. Robert Bosch Robotics, a subsidiary of the German industrial giant, will serve as Humanoid’s contract manufacturer, offering hardware design expertise, production capacity, and supply chain resources. For a startup with roughly 200 engineers, this deal unlocks access to one of Europe’s most extensive manufacturing networks, a type of arrangement that typically requires years of proven commercial success to secure.
Humanoid was founded in London in May 2024 by Artem Sokolov, who previously sold his family’s manufacturing and retail business, described by Forbes as a jewelry empire he had scaled to $1 billion in revenue. Sokolov reportedly invested $30 million of his own capital at launch. The company builds both wheeled and bipedal humanoid robots on its HMND 01 platform, powered by a proprietary AI system called KinetIQ. Earlier this year, its wheeled model completed an eight-hour autonomous shift at a Siemens factory in Erlangen, handling 60 tote moves per hour with a pick-and-place success rate above 90 percent.
The startup claims it has secured 34,000 robot pre-orders worth nearly $2.5 billion, a figure that has not been independently verified and far exceeds the revenue of any humanoid robotics company currently shipping hardware. Humanoid says it built its wheeled prototype in seven months and its bipedal version in five, timelines it attributes to a simulation-first development approach using Nvidia’s physical AI stack. A beta version is planned for the fourth quarter of 2026.
Humanoid’s claim to be Europe’s first pure-play humanoid robotics unicorn is not undisputed. Neura Robotics in Germany closed a round of more than $1 billion in June 2026 at a reported valuation near $7 billion. Meanwhile, Barcelona-based THEKER raised $85 million in a Series A the same month, with backing from LVMH. Globally, Humanoid trails far behind Figure AI and Austin’s Apptronik, which raised $520 million in February at a valuation near $5 billion.
Goldman Sachs projects the global humanoid robot market will reach roughly $38 billion by 2035, a forecast that several startups in the sector have already exceeded in private-market valuation alone. The gap between what investors are pricing and what any company in the space has actually delivered in revenue remains one of the widest in venture capital. Whether Humanoid’s hardware, its Bosch manufacturing deal, and its claimed pre-order pipeline can close that gap is the question this round is designed to answer.
(Source: The Next Web)