Apptronik is a Texas-based humanoid robotics company building Apollo, a general-purpose bipedal robot designed to work alongside humans in factories, warehouses and logistics environments. The company positions Apollo as a labor-augmentation platform for repetitive, ergonomically demanding work across automotive, electronics manufacturing, third-party logistics, beverage and consumer packaged goods verticals.
Apollo is engineered from the ground up, with custom electronics and proprietary actuators derived from years of series-elastic actuator research. The robot is roughly human-sized, runs on swappable batteries and is designed for mixed-use deployment so that a single platform can handle tote-moving, kitting, machine tending and similar tasks rather than being purpose-built for one workflow.
Apptronik was founded in 2016 by Jeff Cardenas (CEO) and Nick Paine (CTO) out of the Human Centered Robotics Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, with co-founders Luis Sentis, Bill Helmsing and Bill Welch. The team spent years building bespoke humanoid and exoskeleton hardware on contract for organizations including NASA before pivoting to a commercial product with Apollo.
The company raised a $350M Series A in February 2025 co-led by B Capital and Capital Factory with participation from Google, then expanded the round with an additional $53M from Mercedes-Benz and ARK Invest to reach $403M. A subsequent $520M Series A extension lifted total Series A funding to roughly $935M at a reported $5B valuation, making Apptronik one of the most heavily capitalized humanoid robotics companies in the United States.
Apptronik has signed pilot agreements with Mercedes-Benz to test Apollo in automotive assembly, GXO Logistics for warehouse fulfillment, and Jabil for electronics manufacturing. The company has also collaborated with NASA on prior humanoid programs. Differentiators include its in-house actuator stack, partnership with Google DeepMind on robot foundation models, and a customer base anchored by Fortune 500 industrial buyers rather than consumer applications.