London Startup Humanoid Raises $150M Series A at $1.2B Valuation, Joins Crowded Humanoid Robot Race

Another humanoid robotics company has crossed the billion-dollar threshold before shipping a product — this one hails from London and its name is as literal as it gets: Humanoid.

Three Key Takeaways

$150M Series A, $1.2B valuation. According to The Information, London-based robotics startup Humanoid has closed $150 million in the first tranche of its Series A at a $1.2 billion pre-money valuation, instantly earning unicorn status. The company is seeking an additional $80–100 million by September.

Targeting commercial and industrial use cases. Humanoid is building general-purpose humanoid robots for commercial and industrial applications, putting it in direct competition with Tesla Optimus, Figure AI, Apptronik, Agility Robotics, 1X, and several Chinese manufacturers. No production prototype has been publicly demonstrated yet.

2026 robotics VC funding already at record levels. Per Crunchbase, global robotics venture funding hit $18.8 billion in H1 2026, a new all-time high. Humanoid is the latest beneficiary of this capital wave.

WangDou's Take

A $1.2 billion valuation with no public production robot and no known customers — in any other industry, that pitch deck gets laughed out of the room. But in the 2026 humanoid robotics race, this actually counts as "conservative": Figure AI was valued at $39.5 billion last year, and Tesla internally prices Optimus in the trillions. Investors aren't buying today's robots; they're buying lottery tickets to a "labor-as-a-service" market that might be worth trillions in 5–10 years. History's consistent lesson, though: in a sector where the winning technical approach hasn't converged yet, maybe two or three out of ten unicorns survive. The rest become expensive footnotes.

Source: The Information, Techmeme