Schaeffler signs on as both actuator supplier and customer of London's Humanoid, planning several hundred robots in its plants over five years

Schaeffler AG, the Herzogenaurach-based maker of bearings, drive systems and automotive components, agreed on 13 January 2026 to supply actuators to London-based Humanoid and to buy the start-up's robots for its own factories. The two companies said the five-year partnership would bring several hundred humanoids into Schaeffler's global production network, making the German group one of the first large European industrials to sign up as component supplier and end user of the same humanoid maker.

According to Schaeffler's release, the alliance rests on two agreements, a supply contract for actuators and a purchase arrangement for humanoids destined for its plants. Humanoid's own announcement adds the operating terms. Schaeffler becomes the preferred supplier of actuators for Humanoid's wheeled platform, the partners will develop joint components together, gather training data through teleoperation and synthetic data generation, and train robot skills for Schaeffler's processes. Deployment is phased, with a beta validation stage in 2026 and 2027, followed by a gamma stage on a robot-as-a-service basis and an option to buy robots outright later. Neither company disclosed financial terms.

The component at the centre of the deal is Schaeffler's strain wave gear actuator. Schaeffler said the unit runs with zero backlash and low friction, allows cables to be routed entirely inside the actuators and limbs, and was designed for high-volume production. The robot it will go into is the HMND 01 Alpha Wheeled, which Humanoid lists at 220 cm tall, 300 kg, with 29 degrees of freedom, a 15 kg payload, a top base speed of 2 m/s and an average runtime of four hours. It can carry a 12-degree-of-freedom five-finger hand or a single-axis parallel gripper and runs KinetIQ, Humanoid's four-layer AI stack built on NVIDIA compute.

Humanoid used the following days to show the robot working in German plants. On 15 January it said a two-week deployment at the Siemens Electronics Factory in Erlangen, which Siemens treated as customer zero, met every target in a tote-to-conveyor destacking task, with 60 tote moves per hour, pick-and-place and autonomous success rates above 90%, daily uptime above eight hours and unbroken autonomous runs of more than 30 minutes across two tote sizes. On 20 January it reported results from the Ford Innovation Centre in Cologne, where the robot handled 8 kg totes for kitting and used both arms to move thin sheet-metal body parts. Humanoid said it reached 97% reliability in fully autonomous pick-and-place, 83 units per hour against a target of 50, and a one-hour uninterrupted run, twice the target, after one hour of on-robot data collection.

A third pilot, disclosed on 30 March, added enterprise software to the picture. Over January and February the robot picked KLT boxes from pallets and placed them on trolleys at a Martur Fompak automotive supplier site in live production, handling three tote types. Tasks were issued by SAP Business AI and SAP Extended Warehouse Management through the SAP Joule agent layer, which Humanoid described as the first time an external enterprise system had controlled its robot in production. No throughput figures were published for that trial.

Humanoid was founded in 2024 by Artem Sokolov and said at the time of the deal that it employed more than 200 engineers and researchers in London, Boston and Vancouver. Schaeffler, founded in 1946, reported revenue of EUR 23.5 billion for 2025, an EBIT margin before special items of 4.0% and 110,753 employees on 3 March 2026. On the same day it said it wants up to 10% of revenue by 2035 to come from new activities such as humanoid robotics and defence, and listed partnerships with four humanoid makers, among them Agility Robotics, Leju Robotics and Humanoid. Chief executive Klaus Rosenfeld framed the Humanoid deal as a way to gain an attractive European partner in that market.

The competitive field is crowded and better funded across the Atlantic. Figure AI raised USD 1 billion in its Series C at a USD 39 billion post-money valuation in September 2025, and Apptronik closed a USD 520 million Series A extension in February 2026. In Europe, Italy's Generative Bionics announced EUR 70 million in December 2025, while Sweden's Hexagon is pushing its AEON humanoid into automotive plants. Humanoid's pitch rests less on capital than on fast industrial pilots with recognisable German names.

The technology choice matters. A strain wave gear uses a flexible toothed ring that deforms inside a rigid outer gear, giving high reduction ratios in a compact, light housing with almost no play, which is why such gears sit in robot arm joints where position accuracy matters. Schaeffler brings decades of precision bearing and gear manufacturing at automotive volumes, and the wheeled HMND 01 sidesteps the balance and fall risks of bipedal walking, a pragmatic fit for flat factory floors.

The open questions are substantial. Several hundred robots over five years is a modest number for a group with more than 110,000 staff, and no unit price, service fee or minimum volume was disclosed. All pilot metrics were reported by Humanoid and its partners after runs measured in hours or weeks, not shifts over months. A 300 kg machine working near people will also have to clear European machinery safety rules before wide use.

What followed set the timeline to watch. On 22 April Schaeffler agreed to integrate at least 1,000 AEON humanoids from Hexagon Robotics over seven years. On 13 May Schaeffler and Humanoid expanded their pact to a four-digit number of wheeled robots by 2032 and a seven-digit number of actuators over five years, covering more than half of Humanoid's joint actuator demand through 2031, with first systems due live before the end of 2026 at Herzogenaurach and Schweinfurt. On 21 July Humanoid raised USD 152 million at a USD 1.35 billion post-money valuation, with Schaeffler and Bosch among the investors.