The Austin company building Apollo - a general-purpose humanoid robot designed to work alongside people, not instead of them.
Austin, Texas · Founded 2016 · ~450 employees · "Robots for Humans"
The Apptronik wordmark. The company's triangular mark echoes the actuator geometry it spent six years perfecting before shipping a robot. - Austin, Texas
The Story
Walk onto the floor of a Mercedes-Benz manufacturing plant and, among the human teams, you may now find a machine about 5 feet 8 inches tall and 160 pounds, moving parts and running through repetitive tasks. It is called Apollo, and it is the product Apptronik has spent nearly a decade working toward. The Austin, Texas company was spun out of the University of Texas at Austin's Human Centered Robotics Lab in 2016, and its first paying job was not glamorous: a contract to develop liquid-cooled actuator technology for NASA.
That origin matters. Before Apptronik built a humanoid, it built the pieces that make a humanoid move - the actuators, the series-elastic joints, the realtime control systems. The founding team, including CEO Jeff Cardenas, CTO Nicholas Paine and UT professor Luis Sentis, had worked on NASA's Valkyrie robot for the DARPA Robotics Challenge. The company then bootstrapped for roughly six years, building 15 different robotic systems, before raising its first significant outside capital in 2022.
"Apollo was created with a simple purpose: to help people."
The pitch is deliberately narrow. Apptronik does not describe Apollo as a replacement for the workforce. It frames the robot as support for "physically demanding, repetitive, or potentially hazardous work" - the trailer unloading, case picking, palletizing and machine tending that wear people down. The company's tagline, "Robots for Humans," is a positioning choice as much as a slogan: it aims Apollo at the tasks that cause injuries and turnover, and leaves the higher-value work to people.
"The future of robotics won't be defined by a single form factor or use case. It will be defined by adaptable platforms that can learn, evolve, and meet people wherever support is needed."
— Apptronik
Products & Services
A general-purpose humanoid, roughly 5'8" and 160 lbs, carrying up to ~55 lbs and running about 4 hours per battery pack. Built for logistics, manufacturing and retail tasks.
The current platform, offered in both bipedal and wheeled-base versions, designed to learn real-world work through large-scale data collection.
A dexterous bimanual upper body developed for supply-chain manipulation - the lineage behind Apollo's arms and hands.
A 90,000 sq ft Austin facility where Apollo robots do real jobs to generate training data, anchoring a global network of Robot Parks.
Series-elastic and liquid-cooled actuators plus realtime control software - the hardware moat that started with NASA.
Apollo 2 ships in two bodies that share one brain: one walks on legs, one rolls on a wheeled base.
The Differentiator
Humanoid robotics is suddenly a crowded field. Tesla's Optimus, Figure AI, Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, 1X and a wave of Chinese makers such as Unitree are all chasing a version of the same idea. Apptronik's argument for itself rests on two things: hardware heritage and AI partnership.
The hardware heritage is the decade spent on actuation and controls before the humanoid boom arrived. That is the unglamorous engineering that is hard to shortcut - and it is why the company was ready with a working platform when customers came looking.
The AI side is the partnership with Google DeepMind. Apptronik supplies the body and the real-world data; DeepMind's Gemini Robotics foundation models supply a growing share of the intelligence. Data Apollo collects at Robot Park and at customer sites feeds back into those models. When the AI leaders choose your robot as the body for their brain, that is a meaningful signal in a field where most players are still building both halves themselves.
The market Apptronik is targeting is enormous and labor-constrained: manufacturing, warehousing and logistics, where aging workforces and injury-prone tasks leave real gaps. The company positions Apollo for a Robot-as-a-Service style model as well as outright sales, with a reported long-run price target near the $50,000 range - a figure that, if reached at scale, changes the math for the jobs it targets.
Customers & Business
Apptronik's customer list skews toward the largest industrial names. Mercedes-Benz is both an investor and a pilot partner, testing Apollo in manufacturing facilities in what was the first publicly announced commercial deployment of the robot. GXO Logistics, a global high-volume logistics operator, hosts Apollo data-collection and warehouse-task work. Jabil, the manufacturing giant, signed on in 2025 to run Apollo units through inspection, sorting, kitting and assembly validation before customer deployment.
The through-line from NASA to a car company is consistent: robots designed to work in spaces built for people, on tasks people already do. With roughly 450 employees, the company remains pre-scale - annual revenue is estimated in the low tens of millions - but the deployments are real, not just demos.
The Money
The 2026 round drew a striking investor mix - existing backers B Capital, Google, Mercedes-Benz and PEAK6, joined by AT&T Ventures, John Deere & Co. and the Qatar Investment Authority. That spread, from an automaker to an equipment maker to a sovereign wealth fund, hints at how broadly the humanoid bet is being placed.
Milestones
Founded from the Human Centered Robotics Lab, with a first contract building actuator and control technology for NASA.
After years of bootstrapping and actuator work, raises roughly $14.6M led by Perot Jain and Grit Ventures.
Reveals Apollo, a general-purpose humanoid designed to work alongside people in logistics and manufacturing.
Signs a commercial agreement to pilot Apollo in Mercedes-Benz facilities and raises an initial $350M Series A.
Partners with Google DeepMind on Gemini Robotics and grows its Series A past $935M; adds a Jabil partnership.
A further $520M at a ~$5B valuation funds production, alongside Apollo 2 and the expanded Robot Park facility.
FAQ
Apptronik builds Apollo, a general-purpose humanoid robot designed to perform physically demanding, repetitive or hazardous work in manufacturing, logistics and retail alongside human teams.
It is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and was spun out of the University of Texas at Austin's Human Centered Robotics Lab in 2016.
Announced partners and customers include Mercedes-Benz, GXO Logistics and Jabil, plus an AI partnership with Google DeepMind and early work with NASA.
The company has raised over $935M in Series A funding plus an additional $520M in 2026 at a roughly $5 billion valuation, with total capital reported above $2 billion.
Apollo stands about 5'8" (1.73 m), weighs roughly 160 lbs (72.6 kg), can carry payloads up to about 55 lbs (25 kg), and runs approximately 4 hours per battery pack.
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