Two years old and priced at 1.35 billion dollars
On 21 July 2026 a company that did not exist three years ago put a price on itself. Humanoid, a robotics business headquartered in London, announced a 152 million dollar Series A at a 1.35 billion dollar post-money valuation, led by Prime Movers Lab. Schaeffler and Bosch joined the round, alongside Taiwan's Fubon Financial Holding Venture Capital and Aglaé Ventures, the investment vehicle backed by the Arnault family behind LVMH. Total funding to date is 270 million dollars, and the company is now described as Europe's first pure-play humanoid robotics unicorn.
You will see two sets of numbers attached to this round. EU-Startups reported it as 133 million euros at a 1.1 billion euro valuation, which is the same money converted into another currency and not a second raise. The dollar figures are the primary ones, and roughly 133 million euros at roughly 1.1 billion euros describes the identical transaction. The operating company sits in London, so a sterling cost base runs underneath a dollar headline.
What the money has bought so far is a team and one shipping product. Humanoid employs more than 50 people hired out of Boston Dynamics, Sanctuary AI, Apptronik and 1X, and its platform is HMND 01, a wheeled machine with modular grippers that the company says reaches roughly 80 percent of human speed on certain tasks. A legged humanoid version is in development, and the AI framework running the machines is called KinetIQ. Artem Sokolov, founder and chief executive, framed it this way: "In just two years, we've gone from an idea to becoming Europe's first pure-play humanoid robotics unicorn."
The order book and the share register name the same companies
Schaeffler and Bosch are investors in this round and customers of the company at the same time. Schaeffler has placed an order for 1,000 robots. That is a strong signal about industrial intent and a weak signal about open-market demand, because the buyer also owns a piece of the upside it is helping to create.
The same discount applies to the headline pre-order number. Humanoid states 34,000 pre-orders worth 2.4 billion dollars, and in this category a pre-order is usually a reservation. It holds a slot and it can lapse. No source has published deposit terms, cancellation rights, or how much of that book sits with investors, so 2.4 billion dollars belongs in the pipeline column until someone discloses a conversion rate.
Klaus Rosenfeld, chief executive of Schaeffler, said that "humanoid robotics is rapidly moving from a visionary concept to an industrial reality." He may well be right about the direction, and he is also a shareholder. Be plain about what is missing: no revenue figure has been disclosed anywhere, the 1.35 billion dollar number is post-money on a Series A, and every capability claim traces back to the company.
The load-bearing number is 100,000 units
Bosch has committed production capacity for 100,000 units over five years. That is the most consequential line in the announcement. Manufacturing capacity is the constraint that has ended every previous humanoid programme, and a manufacturer of that scale agreeing to stand up a line is far harder to reverse than a funding round.
For a buyer, that commitment answers the question that actually arrives at specification time. If you write a humanoid into a 2027 line plan, your exposure is delivery volume at least as much as software quality, and committed capacity is the closest thing to an answer anyone in this category has produced. It is also the number that will move first if the programme slips, which makes it a useful early warning.
The rest of the partner list follows the same logic. SAP, Nvidia and Siemens are named partners, commercial pilots begin late in 2026, and a Beta robot is expected in the fourth quarter. Those dates are the schedule against which the capacity commitment gets tested, and they are close enough to be checked rather than believed.
What to do with this if you run a European plant
Run a pilot with an exit clause and a second-source requirement. Humanoid is two years old, employs more than 50 people and starts its first commercial pilots late in 2026, so anyone specifying it into a 2027 line plan is underwriting a supplier with no production track record. The 80 percent of human speed figure applies to certain tasks, and it should be read as a benchmark on selected work.
The reason to run the pilot at all is that someone else is paying for the learning curve. Schaeffler and Bosch are absorbing the cost of proving whether industrial humanoids hold up in European plants, and the operating knowledge that comes out of that will reach the wider sector well before the fleet economics are settled. A pilot buys you a seat at that table for the price of a line trial.
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