Minerva Humanoids

Minerva Humanoids, Inc. is a San Francisco startup that builds teleoperated humanoid robots for hazardous work, calling itself the Hazardous Operations Humanoid Company. Founded at the end of 2025, it emerged from stealth on 6 October 2026 with about 10 million US dollars in pre-seed funding. It also has offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Sindelfingen, Germany.

Chief executive Sandor Felber previously did humanoid robotics research at MIT CSAIL and worked on Tesla's Optimus programme. Chief technology officer Maurice Rahme spent more than five years at Boston Dynamics, where he was a technical lead on the Stretch warehouse robot. The company says its staff come from organisations including MIT, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, NASA, Agility Robotics and BAE Systems.

Its robot, Roger, is a semi-autonomous humanoid for industrial and public-safety sites, designed for two-handed dexterity rather than general-purpose use. A trained specialist operates it from a safe location: Roger's cameras feed a VR headset, body trackers send the operator's movements to the robot, and haptic gloves return contact feedback. The onboard software, Minerva Intelligence, handles balance, fall recovery and navigation, translates operator motion into robot actions and runs without a live cloud connection; on loss of communications or power the robot freezes and performs a controlled fall away from critical assets. Design choices include coincident wrist axes to mirror a human arm and multiple sensing modalities including thermal. The company says Roger went from a clean-sheet design to a walking prototype in about five months. Height, weight, payload and battery figures have not been published.

Target work in oil and gas includes inspection rounds, condition monitoring such as gauge reading and corrosion tracking, remote valve operation and emergency response to gas alarms, leaks and fire watches, on and offshore. Public-safety uses include explosive ordnance disposal and mine render-safe, CBRNE decontamination and high-risk entry, along with work in high-voltage facilities. Roger has been demonstrated at the NATO EOD Centre of Excellence in Samorin, Slovakia, and tested for airport public-safety missions; first paid industry pilots were scheduled to start in autumn 2026, with no customers named.

First prototypes are built and assembled in Germany, with later production planned in both Germany and the United States, and software developed mainly in the US; the company states an aim to avoid single-source Chinese components. In January 2026 it signed a two-year research framework with Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence on foundation models, perception, reinforcement learning and digital twins for the energy sector, and it works with the University of Waterloo on perception in smoke and darkness. The pre-seed round was led by General Catalyst with Long Journey Ventures and Credo Ventures as co-leads, joined by investors including MVP Ventures, Kaya, Compound, Walter Ventures, Tiny Ventures, Chaotica and Babylon.