My latest at Forbes:
While many robotics companies pursue vertical integration as a near-religious doctrine, Humanoid, founded by Artem Sokolov, is boldly charting the opposite course, creating a fascinating blueprint for capital-efficient growth in Europe’s burgeoning humanoid robotics market. Their recent partnerships with industrial giants Bosch and Schaeffler underscore this distributed strategy.
Bosch, leveraging its global production infrastructure, will manufacture Humanoid’s HMND 01 robots for the European market, following a successful proof-of-concept where the robots autonomously handled logistics tasks. This manufacturing expertise, combined with explorations into integrating Bosch components, positions them as a critical supply and production partner. Similarly, Schaeffler isn’t just a component supplier; they’re also a massive customer, planning to deploy over a thousand robots, scaling to 100,000 by 2031, effectively mirroring an Nvidia-like circular model where partners are both suppliers and major clients.
This approach is profoundly capital-efficient, allowing Humanoid to compete against heavily funded rivals with less than $100 million raised. As Bosch’s Peter Svejkovsky stated, their ‘global production infrastructure and deep industrialization expertise’ makes them ‘the perfect partner to take the step from prototype to volume manufacturing.’ While not owning the full stack carries inherent risks regarding roadmap control, these deep alliances offer partners lucrative access to the future of humanoid labor with minimal R&D outlay. Artem Sokolov encapsulates this vision: ‘Our goal has always been to shorten the path between innovation and real-world integration.’ Humanoid isn’t just building a company; it’s assembling an ecosystem, strategically positioning itself to dominate.