Humanoid Becomes Europe's Newest Robotics Unicorn With a €133M Round

A London startup that has yet to ship a single commercial robot is now worth more than $1 billion. On July 21, Humanoid announced a €133 million ($152 million) Series A at a €1.1 billion ($1.35 billion) post-money valuation, minting Europe's newest robotics unicorn and its first pure-play bet on humanoid machines for the factory floor.

The round was led by Prime Movers Lab, the US venture firm behind Figure AI's headline valuation, with participation from German industrial giants Schaeffler and Bosch, Taiwan's Fubon Financial Holding Venture Capital, and Aglaé Ventures, the investment arm of LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault. The financing brings Humanoid's total capital raised to roughly €236 million ($270 million) for a company that is barely two years old.

"In just two years, we've gone from an idea to becoming Europe's first pure-play humanoid robotics unicorn, partnered with some of the world's leading industrial companies and built one of the strongest pipelines in the industry," said founder and CEO Artem Sokolov. "What we've accomplished in such a short time would typically take a decade."

Sokolov founded Humanoid in London in May 2024 after selling a family manufacturing and retail business that Forbes described as a jewellery empire scaled to roughly $1 billion in revenue. He reportedly seeded the company with around $30 million of his own capital. The startup, which employs a team of roughly 200 engineers drawn from firms across the tech and automotive worlds, builds both wheeled and bipedal robots on its HMND 01 platform, a 175 cm, 70 kg machine with a 15 kg payload, a 1.5 m/s walking speed and about four hours of runtime.

The manufacturing deal that matters more than the money

The most consequential detail of the round may not be the cheque but the partner attached to it. Robert Bosch Robotics, a subsidiary of the German industrial group, will act as Humanoid's contract manufacturer, supplying hardware design, production capacity and supply-chain expertise. It is the kind of arrangement that usually takes years of commercial traction to secure.

"We see significant growth opportunities in the field of humanoid robotics," said Mathias Pillin, chief technology officer of Robert Bosch. "Bosch will act as Humanoid's contract manufacturing partner, while also providing strategic consulting and technical expertise in hardware design, production, and supply chain."

The company has also lined up an unusually deep bench of Fortune 500 partners for its age, including SAP, Nvidia, Bosch and Siemens. Most notably, it recently signed what it calls the industry's largest publicly announced commercial agreement, with investor Schaeffler, for the large-scale deployment of thousands of humanoid robots in manufacturing environments. Its wheeled model reportedly completed an eight-hour autonomous shift at a Siemens factory in Erlangen earlier this year, handling 60 tote moves per hour at a pick-and-place success rate above 90 percent.

Humanoid says the new capital will fund a next-generation platform, the start of mass manufacturing of its wheel-based robots, and continued development of its proprietary AI brain, KinetIQ, which the company describes as a vertically integrated system that lets robots "understand, reason, and execute complex physical tasks." Commercial Beta units are slated to begin rolling out to customer sites across logistics, manufacturing and retail in the fourth quarter of 2026.

Why it matters

Humanoid's raise is the latest surge in a physical-AI funding wave that has, until now, been dominated by the United States and China. Austin's Apptronik raised $520 million in February at a valuation near $5 billion; Figure AI has been valued as high as $39 billion; and 1X and Agility Robotics continue to draw large cheques. Europe was conspicuously absent from that list, and investors are now racing to prove the region can produce a category leader of its own.

"Humanoid robotics will be one of the defining technologies of the next decade, reshaping how commercial and industrial work gets done," said Zia Huque, general partner at Prime Movers Lab. "We expect the field to consolidate around a handful of category leaders across the US, Europe, and China."

That consolidation thesis explains the eye-watering valuations, but it also exposes the gap between price and product. Humanoid has not shipped a commercial unit, and its most striking figures are self-reported: it claims 34,000 pre-orders worth nearly $2.5 billion, a number no independent party has verified and one that dwarfs the actual revenue of every humanoid maker currently shipping hardware. Its seven-month prototype timelines lean on Nvidia-powered simulation, but remain the company's own account. Goldman Sachs projects the global humanoid market will reach only about $38 billion by 2035, a figure several startups have already surpassed in private-market valuation alone.

Even Humanoid's "first" claim is contested. Germany's Neura Robotics closed a round exceeding $1 billion in June at a reported valuation near $7 billion, and Barcelona's THEKER raised $85 million the same month with LVMH backing. What sets Humanoid apart is less a technical lead than a strategy: locking in industrial incumbents as investors, manufacturers and customers simultaneously.

What to watch

The Q4 2026 Beta rollout is the real test. Pre-order pipelines and factory pilots are promises; paying customers running robots on live production lines are proof. Watch whether the Schaeffler deployment moves from memorandum to installed units, and whether Bosch's manufacturing muscle can turn a 200-person startup into a company that ships at scale. If Humanoid converts even a fraction of its claimed backlog into recurring revenue, the €1.1 billion tag will look conservative. If it does not, this round will stand as another data point in the widest valuation-to-revenue gap in venture capital.