Minerva Humanoids raises about $10 million pre-seed from General Catalyst for a teleoperated humanoid aimed at bomb disposal and oil rigs

Minerva Humanoids said in a release distributed through GlobeNewswire on Oct 6 that it raised about $10 million in pre-seed funding led by General Catalyst, with Long Journey Ventures and Credo Ventures as co-leads. MVP Ventures, Kaya, RunwayVC, Compound, Founders Embassy, Hugging Face, Codecademy, YG, Walter Ventures, Tiny Ventures, Chaotica and Babylon also took part. The San Francisco company, founded at the end of 2025, used the round to come out of stealth. It disclosed no valuation.

The product is Roger, a semi-autonomous humanoid built for jobs where people die: offshore and onshore energy work, high-voltage plants, explosive ordnance disposal and hazardous material response. A trained operator sees through the robot's cameras in a VR headset and does the fine manipulation, while the company's control software, Minerva Intelligence, handles balance, fall recovery and navigation. The company said it went from idea to a walking prototype in five months, and that its first paid pilots start this autumn, with energy and bomb-disposal deployments planned for later in 2026. It is also exploring deployments at two of the world's ten busiest airports and has partnerships with MBZUAI on energy-sector capabilities and with the University of Waterloo on perception in smoke and darkness.

The founding team explains the speed. Chief executive Sandor Felber helped start MIT CSAIL's humanoid research line and worked on Tesla's Optimus programme; chief technology officer Maurice Rahme spent six years at Boston Dynamics as a technical lead on the Stretch robot. Dominic Asquith, a British Special Forces veteran, runs hazardous operations. Software is developed mainly in the US, the first prototypes are built in Germany, and the company said it plans to manufacture in Germany and the US without relying on single-source Chinese components. The release does not itemise how the money will be spent.

Why a teleoperated humanoid can sell before autonomy is solved

Minerva is betting that the first paying humanoid market is the one where a human operator is a feature, not a stopgap, because bomb technicians and rig crews already work through remote tools and judge risk by distance.

In MEKAWIRE's database, about $10 million is the largest robotics pre-seed round of 2026 with a disclosed amount, ahead of Aleph Surgical's $7.5 million and Tangent Robotics' $4.5 million, both announced on Sep 30. Across seed and pre-seed rounds together it ranks third of seven, behind Walden Robotics' $300 million seed and SafeWorld's $12.2 million. The counter-argument is that defence and energy buyers procure slowly and certify equipment over years, so a five-month prototype says little about how fast revenue arrives.

What would change our view: the first named pilot customer this autumn, and whether Roger's German build holds up once Minerva has to source actuators at volume outside China.