Updated: September 29, 2026 (7531-10-09 in the Bulgarian calendar)
This profile covers the company behind Apollo, one of the robots featured in our Key Players and Platforms overview — the oldest of the new humanoid startups, and the one that has made the most deliberate decisions about what not to build itself.
Founding
Apptronik was founded in 2016 as a spinout from the Human Centered Robotics Lab at the University of Texas at Austin — six years before Figure, and long before humanoids were a fundable category. Its co-founders are Jeff Cardenas (CEO), who came from technology commercialisation rather than engineering, and Dr. Nick Paine (CTO), whose UT Austin doctorate produced the series elastic actuators the company's hardware is still built on. Dr. Luis Sentis, who ran the lab, remains an advisor.
The credential that matters most predates the company's humanoid ambitions: the team built NASA's Valkyrie, the agency's own humanoid, and worked on NASA's DARPA Robotics Challenge entry. Among the current generation of startups only Boston Dynamics has a deeper institutional lineage, and Boston Dynamics is thirty years old.
The technical inheritance shows up in the hardware philosophy. Series elastic actuators put a deliberate spring between motor and joint: the robot gives slightly when it hits something, and can measure the force it is applying. That is a different answer to working near people than Agility's motion planning or NEURA's sensing skin — it is compliance built into the metal rather than into the software.
Country and Headquarters
Apptronik is a United States company headquartered in Austin, Texas, a few miles from the university it came out of.
Leadership
Jeff Cardenas is co-founder and CEO; Dr. Nick Paine is co-founder and CTO. The executive team has been assembled for scaling rather than for research: Steve O'Dea as COO over engineering, manufacturing and field service, Barry Phillips as Chief Commercial Officer, formerly CMO at Fetch Robotics before Zebra acquired it, Daniel Chu as Chief Product Officer after two decades at Waymo, 23andMe and Google, and Kay Sheils Kingsbury as CFO.
The most telling hire is Rachel Salamone as Chief People Officer, who previously held the same role at Boston Dynamics and grew it from just over 100 people to more than 1,500. Hiring specifically for that experience says the company expects its hard problem to be organisational growth, not robotics.
Company Size and Funding
Apptronik's funding history is peculiar in a way worth spelling out, because the headline number is routinely misread. The company has raised close to $1 billion — all of it still called a Series A:
- February 2025 — $350 million, co-led by B Capital and Capital Factory, with Google participating.
- March 2025 — a further $53 million, taking the round to $403 million.
- 11 February 2026 — $520 million more, bringing total Series A financing past $935 million. Led by existing investors B Capital, Google, Mercedes-Benz and PEAK6, with AT&T Ventures, John Deere and the Qatar Investment Authority joining. Apptronik says the extension was priced at three times the original Series A valuation.
The investor list is the substance, not the total. Google, Mercedes-Benz, John Deere, AT&T — these are strategic investors with factories, fleets and field operations, not funds looking for a multiple. A carmaker and an agricultural-equipment maker putting money into the same humanoid is a stronger signal about perceived usefulness than any valuation.
Development Directions and Products
Before Apollo, Apptronik spent years building actuators, exoskeletons and research platforms for other people — roughly a dozen robots, including the NASA work. Apollo is the first product aimed at a market rather than a contract.
- Apollo (2023) — 5′8″ (1.73 m), about 72 kg, a 25 kg payload and roughly four hours on a hot-swappable battery pack. Built around simplified, modular actuators, explicitly so that repair and manufacture stay cheap — a design goal aimed at total cost of ownership rather than at capability demos.
- Apollo 2 (June 2026) — offered in both bipedal and wheeled-base configurations, running the Artemis control stack with Fleet Connect fleet-management software. Apptronik describes it as a platform for scaled pilots and data collection rather than a finished commercial product.
- Apollo 3 — described by the company as its first true commercial product, targeted at 2027.
A caveat on the numbers above: the published specifications are still the 2023 Apollo figures and have not been reconfirmed for Apollo 2, so treat them as indicative of the family rather than exact for the current machine.
Also new in June 2026 is Robot Park, a roughly 90,000 sq ft training and data-collection facility in Austin where fleets of Apollo 2 units generate embodied-AI training data.
Two things Apptronik deliberately does not build
The factory. Apollo is manufactured by Jabil, one of the largest contract electronics manufacturers in the world — which also deploys Apollo in its own plants, making it simultaneously supplier and customer. Figure built BotQ and Tesla converted a car line; Apptronik rented three decades of someone else's manufacturing competence instead.
The brain. Where Figure left OpenAI to build Helix in-house, Apptronik partnered with Google DeepMind and runs Gemini Robotics. When DeepMind launched Gemini Robotics 2 on 30 July 2026, the whole-body-control demonstration ran on Apollo 2. That is a genuine strategic fork: Apptronik is betting that the model becomes a commodity layer supplied by companies with far more AI capital, and that the durable advantage is in hardware, cost and deployment.
Markets and Customers
Apptronik has more named commercial relationships than any humanoid company except Agility, and they span three unrelated industries:
- Mercedes-Benz — Apollo trials at the Berlin-Marienfelde Digital Factory Campus and at the Kecskemét plant in Hungary, delivering parts weighing up to 25 kg and navigating the floor autonomously.
- GXO Logistics — Apollo 2 units under a multi-phase R&D programme, the same logistics customer Agility also works with.
- Jabil — electronics manufacturing, as both builder and user.
The honest reading: these are pilots and R&D programmes, not volume contracts, and Apptronik says so itself by calling Apollo 3 in 2027 its first commercial product. What distinguishes the company is not how far along it is but how few bets it is making at once. It builds the body and buys the factory and the brain, which means it can be wrong about AI architecture or manufacturing and still survive — a hedge neither Figure nor Tesla has taken.