humanoid-robots
(8)
Steve Xie
Steve Xie is the founder and CEO of Lightwheel, a physical AI infrastructure company building simulation and synthetic data systems that teach robots to learn and operate in the real world. A physicist by training with a Columbia PhD, he led autonomous driving simulation at Cruise, NVIDIA, and NIO before starting Lightwheel in 2023. The company supplies SimReady 3D assets, egocentric human data, and robot evaluation tools to labs including NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, and Figure, and raised roughly $137.5 million in 2026 to expand its data and evaluation infrastructure.
Jeff Cardenas
Jeff Cardenas is the co-founder and CEO of Apptronik, an Austin-based robotics company building Apollo, a general-purpose AI-powered humanoid robot. He spun the company out of the University of Texas Human Centered Robotics Lab in 2016 and has since raised close to $1 billion, secured a strategic partnership with Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics, and positioned the company among the small handful of credible US humanoid players. He frames the race to build practical humanoids as the 'space race of our time.'
Matthieu Masselin
Matthieu Masselin is the CEO and co-founder of Wandercraft, the Paris-based robotics company behind Atalante, the Eve personal exoskeleton, and the Calvin-40 humanoid robot. Trained as an engineer at Ecole Polytechnique, he took over as CEO in 2018 and led the company through FDA clearances, a Renault manufacturing partnership, and a Series D that brought total funding to about $169M.
Jay Li
Jay Li is the founder and CEO of Proception, a Palo Alto robotics startup building high-dexterity robotic hands for humanoid robots. A former electronics lead on Tesla's Optimus program, he left to bet that the fastest path to capable robots runs through hardware close enough to the human hand that machines can learn directly from people. His ProHand packs 22 degrees of freedom and skin-like tactile sensors; its companion ProGlove captures human manipulation data with no robot in the loop. In June 2026 Proception shipped its first hands, settled a Tesla trade-secret lawsuit, and closed an $11M seed round led by First Round Capital on the same day.
Ashish Kapoor
Ashish Kapoor is the co-founder and CEO of General Robotics (formerly Scaled Foundations), a Redmond, Washington startup building a unified intelligence layer for robots of every shape. After 17 years at Microsoft, where he led the Autonomous Systems and Robotics Research group, created the open-source AirSim simulator, and co-authored the widely read 'ChatGPT for Robotics' paper, Kapoor set out in 2023 to make robot intelligence portable across hardware. His thesis: general intelligence emerges from the rich composition of many robot skills, not from a single ever-larger model. He holds a PhD from the MIT Media Lab, flies and has built his own airplane, and treats simulation as the laboratory where machines learn to be safe before they touch the real world.
Deepak Pathak
Deepak Pathak is the co-founder and CEO of Skild AI, the Pittsburgh robotics company building a single general-purpose 'brain' that can run any robot from a quadruped to a humanoid. A Raj Reddy Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon, he earned a gold medal at IIT Kanpur and a PhD at UC Berkeley before betting that physical intelligence, not language, is the real path to AGI. In January 2026 Skild raised $1.4 billion at a valuation north of $14 billion, backed by SoftBank, Nvidia, and Jeff Bezos.
Tony Zhao
Tony Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Sunday, a Mountain View-based robotics company building Memo - a home robot trained on 10 million episodes of real household routines. A Stanford PhD dropout and UC Berkeley EECS alum, Zhao invented ALOHA and ACT during his doctoral research, open-source frameworks that became foundational to modern robot manipulation. Sunday reached unicorn status in March 2026 with a $165M Series B led by Coatue, putting the company at a $1.15B valuation with a mission to put a helpful robot in every home.
Ritesh Ragavender
Ritesh Ragavender is the Founder and CEO of Reflex Robotics, a New York-based startup building affordable, general-purpose wheeled humanoid robots for warehouse and logistics operations. A former MIT student with roots in quantitative finance and a prior YCombinator-backed startup, Ragavender launched Reflex in 2022 with a team drawn from Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Anduril, and Oculus. The company raised a $7M seed round led by Khosla Ventures in 2024 and has since partnered with GXO Logistics - the world's largest pure-play contract logistics provider - for live warehouse deployments. Reflex's robots aim to be 20x cheaper than competing humanoids, combining AI policies that improve with every shift with human-in-the-loop remote supervision.