Minerva Humanoids

Full Name

Minerva Humanoids, Inc.

About

Minerva Humanoids, Inc. is a United States robotics company based in San Francisco, founded in late 2025 and emerged from stealth on 6 October 2026. It describes itself as the hazardous operations humanoid company, with the stated purpose of empowering society to reach new frontiers without risking human life and of turning the world's most dangerous jobs into safer, reliable and predictable operations. Its founders are Sandor Felber, the chief executive, who previously worked on actuator control for Tesla Optimus and then on humanoid control research at MIT CSAIL, and Maurice Rahme, the chief technology officer, who spent six years at Boston Dynamics and was a technical lead on the Stretch manipulation programme from early prototypes through commercial launch. The company says it progressed from concept to a walking prototype in five months, and it presents the team as forged by veterans of MIT, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, NASA, Agility Robotics, BAE Systems, Oxford and Harvard among others. Its product is Roger, a semi-autonomous humanoid built for hazardous industrial and public-safety work. The operating model is the differentiator rather than full autonomy: an operator in a VR headset sees through the robot's cameras, body trackers send the operator's motion to the robot and haptic feedback returns contact information, over what the company calls a cybersecure, military-grade link, while onboard software handles balance, navigation and recovery from falls. Minerva plans to introduce greater autonomy progressively along a spectrum from remote teleoperation to fully independent execution. In oil and gas the company frames three uses: emergency response, where Roger is deployed remotely into situations such as a toxic gas alarm, a leak or a fire watch while people stay behind the muster line; condition monitoring, covering scheduled line walkdowns every shift with gauges read, corrosion tracked and anomalies flagged before they become incidents; and remote operations, where every teleoperated inspection is one fewer person on board, meaning fewer helicopter seats, fewer beds and reduced personnel-on-board risk. In public safety the company focuses on explosive ordnance disposal and mine render-safe, chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear decontamination, and high-risk entry, with the aim of keeping the bomb technician outside the blast radius and out of the bomb suit. The robot is being developed to weigh under 100 kg when outfitted, to navigate stairs and wet surfaces, to fit into a passenger seat for transport and to take modular payloads for different environments. Initial hardware is manufactured and assembled in Germany while much of the software and artificial intelligence development happens in the United States, and longer-term production is planned across both countries with the aim of building a Western-focused supply base and reducing reliance on single-source Chinese components. First paid pilots are planned for autumn 2026. The company announced approximately USD 10 million in pre-seed funding led by General Catalyst, with Long Journey Ventures and Credo Ventures as co-leads and MVP Ventures, Kaya VC, Compound, Runway FBU, Tiny Ventures, Walter Ventures, Chaotica, Babylon, Firedrop and Embassy Ventures also participating. It also holds a two-year research partnership with Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, announced on 28 January 2026 and initially focused on humanoids for safety-critical energy environments, covering foundation models and multimodal perception, computer vision and reinforcement learning, and digital twins and simulation.

Robot Products

Roger

Released 2026

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