Humanoid

Most humanoid companies are chasing a fully general-purpose biped with five-fingered hands. Humanoid made the opposite call. Its first product, HMND 01 Alpha, is a wheeled mobile manipulator built to do real warehouse and factory jobs now, not to demo a moonshot later.

Founded in London in 2024 by Artem Sokolov, the company moved fast enough to raise eyebrows: it took the wheeled robot from concept to working prototype in seven months, and had the bipedal version walking 48 hours after final assembly. It is already running proof-of-concept pilots with Schaeffler, Bosch, and Siemens. The bet is speed and practicality over sci-fi, and industrial customers used to multi-quarter integration cycles keep saying this one looks different.

Humanoid builds general-purpose humanoid robots for labor-intensive industrial work: goods handling, picking and packing, kitting, and part handling in warehouses, e-commerce fulfilment, and manufacturing lines. The pitch is that the world is already shaped for humans, so a human-shaped robot drops into existing facilities without the costly redesign a caged industrial arm demands.

The flagship HMND 01 stands about 175 cm, weighs 70 kg, walks up to 1.5 m/s, carries a 15 kg payload, and runs roughly four hours per charge. In a Schaeffler pilot the company says it hit 60 totes an hour at a 90%-plus success rate with 8-plus hours of uptime, which is the kind of number that separates a lab video from a line-ready machine.

Humanoid frames its market around a labor gap it did not invent. Warehousing, manufacturing, retail, and logistics all lean on physical, repetitive, sometimes dangerous work that fewer people want to do, and demographics are making it worse as birth rates fall and populations age.

Existing automation only goes so far. Fixed industrial arms and conveyors handle the structured, high-volume tasks, but the messy edge cases still fall to people. Humanoid's argument is that a mobile, dexterous, human-shaped robot can take those in-between jobs without anyone rebuilding the building around it.

The near-term customer is the industrial buyer: retail, e-commerce, third-party logistics, manufacturing, and automotive operations moving goods at scale. These are B2B deployments run alongside human workers on real production floors, which is why the early partners are names like Schaeffler, Bosch, and Siemens rather than consumers.

The company talks openly about a longer arc into services by 2029 and households by 2031, but that is roadmap, not product. Today the ideal user is an operations leader with tote-to-conveyor and pick-and-place work they cannot fully staff.

Humanoid sells a modular platform rather than a single robot. HMND 01 comes in a wheeled Alpha built for industrial-grade reliability and low cost of ownership, and a bipedal Alpha aimed at tighter, more complex spaces. Both share exchangeable upper bodies, lower bodies, and end-effectors so one design can be tuned per use case instead of building a new robot each time.

Sitting above the hardware is KinetIQ, the company's VLM and VLA-based AI framework for orchestrating mixed fleets of wheeled and bipedal robots. The idea behind it is a real moat: a skill trained once can propagate across every robot in the field.

Humanoid is going to market with robot-as-a-service rather than one-off hardware sales. Customers get the robot plus fleet-management software, maintenance, 24/7 technical support, over-the-air updates, and ongoing performance management as a bundled, managed offering.

That model fits a machine that gets smarter after it ships and lowers the barrier for an operator wary of a large capital purchase. No public pricing exists yet; deals so far run through direct partnership and pilot agreements, and buyers request access through the company's sales team.

Humanoid enters a crowded, hyped field against far better-funded rivals building general-purpose humanoids for industry. Its edge is a deliberate one: start wheeled and industrial where the tasks are tractable and the ROI is closer, then generalize, instead of promising a do-everything biped on day one.

The other card it plays is people. Its engineering leadership is pulled from Boston Dynamics, Amazon Robotics, Brain Corp, Sanctuary AI, and others who have actually deployed robots at fleet scale, which is rarer in this space than the demo reels suggest.

Humanoid's traction is unusually concrete for a two-year-old robotics startup. It has completed live proof-of-concept runs with Siemens (tote-to-conveyor de-stacking), Bosch (moving boxes across five sizes from conveyor to trolley), and SAP with Martur Fompak, and signed a deployment deal with Schaeffler covering hundreds of robots over five years.

The Schaeffler arrangement goes deeper than a customer order: Schaeffler will also be a preferred supplier of joint actuators through 2031, and the two are co-developing the next generation. Reported pilot performance of 60 totes an hour at 90%-plus success is the kind of metric that turns a partnership into a purchase.

The praise for Humanoid centers on pace. Building a working industrial humanoid in seven months and landing named enterprise pilots inside two years is fast by any measure, and the deep-deployment pedigree of its team gets noticed.

The skepticism is less about Humanoid specifically and more about the moment. Even at events meant to sell the technology, researchers question whether humanoids will take root soon, and some argue China has more momentum on hardware. The fair read: Humanoid is executing well inside a category that still has to prove its economics.

Humanoid's funding story is unusual. Founder Artem Sokolov has bankrolled the company himself, reportedly putting in around $30 million and remaining its sole shareholder, financing the first robots and three international offices out of his own pocket.

As of early 2026 the company was in talks to raise roughly $200 million in a Series A, with no valuation set and the round not yet closed. Treat that as intent, not a done deal. Sokolov funded it after selling his family's jewelry business, and he runs the venture builder SKL.vc on the side.

Humanoid has done the hard early part well: a working robot, named enterprise pilots, and a deployment deal, all inside two years. The next chapter is harder, moving from proofs of concept to robots running reliably around the clock to strict SLAs, and closing a Series A to fund the scale-up.

The risk is the one hanging over the whole category. Humanoid robotics is still unproven economically, and even boosters are cautious. If Humanoid converts the Schaeffler and Bosch relationships into a paying fleet, its wheeled-first wedge looks smart. If the round stalls or the pilots do not scale, being early and fast will not be enough.

Humanoid grew from nothing to roughly 160-plus people across London, Boston, Vancouver, and San Diego in about a year, recruiting from Boston Dynamics, Amazon Robotics, Sanctuary AI, Brain Corp, Yandex Self-Driving, Google, and Cloudflare. Founder Artem Sokolov previously scaled a family manufacturing business to a billion-dollar valuation and was an EY Entrepreneur of the Year in 2021; the CTO, Jarad Cannon, comes from turning robotics research into deployed systems.

The culture is high-urgency and hands-on, built around getting robots out of the lab and into customer facilities in days to weeks. It leans in-person: employees are expected in the office five days a week, with daily breakfast, catered lunch, and heavy use of AI-assisted engineering tooling as standard practice.

Humanoid discloses base salary ranges on some roles, and its engineering bands run wide, roughly $120,000 to $350,000 a year on disclosed US and UK positions, with a couple of named US roles landing around $150,000 to $200,000. A Canadian engineering role was posted on an hourly contract basis.

Equity is a consistent thread: nearly every job description offers stock options, framed as builders sharing in what they build. UK roles add fully funded private healthcare and an 8% total pension contribution; US roles add fully paid medical, dental, and vision plus a 401(k) with match.

The company markets itself as Humanoid but the registered legal entity is SKL Robotics LTD, based in the United Kingdom. Its headquarters is 5 Merchant Square, London W2 1AY, with additional offices at 1 Broadway in Cambridge, Massachusetts and 6060 Silver Drive in Burnaby, British Columbia.

Public detail on data practices and compliance is thin at this stage, which is common for an early hardware company still moving from pilots to production. The clearest legal signal is the copyright footprint across the site, which credits SKL Robotics LTD.

Humanoid has drawn steady industry press through 2026, most of it tracking its jump from prototype to signed pilots. The throughline: a UK startup punching above its funding weight with enterprise partners in Germany.

The most consequential coverage is the Schaeffler deal, which pairs a hundreds-of-robots deployment with a multi-year actuator supply arrangement, and the Forbes report on the founder self-funding the company while raising a Series A.