My latest at Forbes:
Two-year-old British startup Humanoid has signed a deal to integrate “a four-digit number of humanoid robots into live manufacturing operations” at German industrial giant Schaeffler’s factories starting later this year. The bigger news, however, might be that Humanoid has committed to buying a “seven-digit number of actuators” from Schaeffler over the term of the agreement — suggesting Humanoid intends to ship a staggering 100,000 humanoid robots across all its clients over the next five years.
Four months ago, Schaeffler and Humanoid announced they’d put “several hundred” humanoid robots into Schaeffler’s factories. Something must be working, because the two companies have now upgraded that number significantly and signed an agreement for at least 1,000 — and potentially many more — humanoid robots in live manufacturing operations. That makes this one of the largest disclosed humanoid robot rollouts to date.
Phase one runs from December 2026 through June 2027 across two Schaeffler sites in Germany. At Herzogenaurach, Humanoid will focus on box-handling inside a live production environment. At Schweinfurt, the deployment starts with a three-month capability demonstration, followed by three months validating “stable, continuous operation approaching full production scale.”
The agreement is structured as Robot-as-a-Service, with Humanoid providing fleet management software, maintenance, 24/7 support and ongoing performance management bundled in.
The actuator supply deal is where the really big numbers emerge. At 20 Schaeffler-relevant actuators per robot and 100% coverage, one million actuators = 50,000 robots. At 50% coverage (what the contract stipulates), that’s 100,000 robots over five years.
Notably, the Schaeffler contract is exclusively for Humanoid’s wheeled platform — not its bipedal HMND 01. As Schaeffler’s Andreas Zeug noted: “For industrial use, we have completely even floors, so we don’t need legs.”
The circular dynamic here is striking: Schaeffler is simultaneously one of the most aggressive industrial adopters of humanoids and a preferred component supplier for the platforms it’s buying. The company is now engaged with roughly 45 humanoid robotics players worldwide and expects its humanoid robotics division to secure an order book in the hundreds of millions of euros by 2030 — making Schaeffler something like the Nvidia of humanoid robotics.