Apptronik is a Humanoid company founded in 2016 and based in Austin, United States. It has raised $963M in total funding, most recently a Series A Extension in 2026 at a $5.5B valuation.
United States| Date | Stage | Amount | Valuation | Lead investors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 11, 2026 | Series A Extension | $520M | $5B | B Capital, Google, Mercedes-Benz |
Apptronik's assets are pedigree, marquee pilots (Mercedes-Benz, GXO, Jabil), and a Google DeepMind collaboration putting Gemini Robotics models on its Apollo humanoid — genuine validation, but none of it is a structural barrier a well-funded rival cannot match. The humanoid is still in pilot rather than scaled commercial deployment, so pricing, essentiality, and growth are all unobservable. The scorecard is honestly mostly Not Rated by rule. The live risk is the same as the whole humanoid field: converting pilots into locked-in, paying dependence before better-funded programs and robot foundation-model labs close the gap.
Cardenas spun Apptronik out of the University of Texas at Austin's Human Centered Robotics Lab in 2016 alongside Nick Paine, Bill Helmsing, and Luis Sentis. The team's prior NASA work on Valkyrie informed the actuator and control systems that underpin Apptronik's humanoid program. As CEO, Cardenas has guided the company from lab work into industrial programs with Mercedes-Benz, GXO, and Jabil and the opening of Robot Park, Apptronik's Austin operating facility for Apollo 2.
Paine led the actuator-architecture work at UT Austin's Human Centered Robotics Lab that enabled NASA Valkyrie's compliant control. He carried the IP and team into Apptronik in 2016 as CTO, where he's responsible for the hardware platform across all five Apollo generations. Less publicly visible than Cardenas; widely respected by the academic legged-robotics community.
Co-founded Apptronik in 2016 as a spin-out from UT Austin's Human Centered Robotics Lab, where the team had worked on NASA's Valkyrie humanoid robot. Helmsing served as COO during Apptronik's early years and later became COO at Iron-IQ. His operating work helped move the company from university research toward commercial humanoid development.
A professor of aerospace engineering at UT Austin, Sentis earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University and was a La Caixa Foundation Fellow. Before co-founding Apptronik, he worked at NASA Johnson Space Center helping design and test the Valkyrie humanoid robot. Apptronik was spun out of his Human Centered Robotics Laboratory at UT Austin, which originally developed the actuation and control systems underpinning NASA's Valkyrie. Sentis's "human-centered" design philosophy — robots built to work alongside people rather than replace them — directly shaped Apptronik's approach with Apollo.
General-purpose industrial humanoid offered in bipedal and wheeled configurations. Apptronik uses Apollo 2 at its Robot Park facility for material movement and machine tending, both to validate customer workflows and to generate real-world data for Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics models.
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