Humanoid wheeled robots draw $152M for factory rollout
London based Humanoid has raised $152 million in a Series A at a $1.35 billion post money valuation, according to Tech Times, with Bosch and Schaeffler joining a round led by Prime Movers Lab. The company says total funding is now $270 million.
The investor list is the real industrial signal. Schaeffler is not just a backer, but an anchor customer and actuator supplier. Bosch is not just a backer either. Through Robert Bosch Robotics GmbH, it is slated to manufacture the HMND 01 platform, with production capacity earmarked for up to 100,000 units over the next five years.
Humanoid is calling itself Europe’s first pure play humanoid robotics unicorn. The qualifier does work here. Tech Times notes that Germany’s NEURA Robotics closed a much larger Series C of up to $1.4 billion at a $7 billion valuation in June 2026, but NEURA also sells light robot arms and mobile platforms. Humanoid’s claim rests on its narrower humanoid only positioning.
A wheeled humanoid aimed at factory floors
The HMND 01 Alpha is not a biped. It is a dual arm mobile manipulator on an omnidirectional wheeled base, standing 220 centimeters tall and moving at up to 7.2 km/h. The current Alpha configuration carries up to 15 kilograms total, has close to 29 degrees of freedom, and can use either a 12 DOF five finger hand or a parallel gripper. Compute comes from NVIDIA Jetson Thor, listed at about 800 TOPS of AI inference capacity.
Humanoid’s technical bet is that factory floors do not need legs if the target work is box handling, tote logistics and container transfer. The report argues that bipedal systems still spend too much of their control budget on balance for commercial uptime in structured plants. A wheeled base also gives Humanoid a simpler path toward CE certification, which the company is targeting by 2027.
Schaeffler appears to agree with that operating premise. Its deployment agreement with Humanoid, signed May 13, 2026, targets a four digit number of wheeled robots across Schaeffler’s global facilities by 2032. The first phase is scheduled for December 2026 through June 2027 at two German sites: Herzogenaurach for box handling in live production operations, and Schweinfurt for a six month validation phase focused on stable, continuous operation approaching full production scale.
KinetIQ ties fleet planning to low level control
Humanoid’s KinetIQ software is described as a four layer control architecture operating across different timescales. At the top, System 3 assigns work across a facility within seconds. System 2 breaks instructions into subtasks for an individual robot. System 1 handles vision language action control at 5 to 10 Hz, while System 0 runs whole body control at 50 Hz.
The locomotion layer uses reinforcement learning trained entirely in simulation, with Tech Times citing about 15,000 hours of simulated experience for a capable model. Humanoid says the approach applies to wheeled and bipedal platforms, allowing data from one embodiment to improve the other. For now, the commercial emphasis is clearly on wheeled systems, where stability and certification are more tractable.
The report also cites IDC projections that wheeled humanoid robots will grow at about 120 percent compound annually, ahead of roughly 95 percent for full bipedal humanoids. Forecasts in this category should be treated cautiously, but the direction matches what many industrial buyers are asking for: mobility where it is useful, without paying for legged locomotion where it adds little operational value.
The contracts reduce some risk, not the uptime problem
The Schaeffler relationship also covers supply. The company is set to provide more than 50 percent of Humanoid’s joint actuator demand for wheeled platforms through 2031, involving a seven digit number of actuators. Since actuators are estimated in the report at 40 to 60 percent of a humanoid robot’s bill of materials cost, locking down that supply is a substantial manufacturing advantage.
Bosch has already run a proof of concept at an intralogistics facility in Bühl, Germany, where HMND 01 robots autonomously moved boxes from a conveyor to a trolley across five box sizes and footprints. The report also says a Siemens Erlangen electronics factory validation covered tote logistics against speed, reliability and uptime targets.
Several headline figures remain company claims. Humanoid says it has 34,000 preorders worth about $2.4 billion and nine completed proof of concept projects with Fortune 500 partners, but Tech Times says those figures have not been independently verified.
The next hard test is scheduled for Q4 2026, when Beta robots are expected to enter sustained factory operation. A robot that can move boxes in a controlled trial is one thing. A fleet that can keep doing it across shifts, with dented packaging, imperfect trolley placement and ordinary plant variability, is the standard Schaeffler’s factories will apply.
Source: techtimes.com
