Minerva Humanoids emerged from stealth on 6 October with a $10 million pre-seed round led by General Catalyst, co-led by Long Journey Ventures and Credo Ventures. The company is building Roger, a semi-autonomous humanoid that a trained specialist pilots remotely through a VR headset, and it is pointing the machine at four markets where the fatality rate does the selling: onshore and offshore oil and gas, explosive ordnance disposal, hazardous-material response and airport public safety.
Why it matters: a human in the loop, not a robot on its own
Almost every well-funded humanoid programme is chasing full autonomy in a warehouse. Minerva is betting the first revenue arrives earlier and from the other direction — keep the human judgment, move the human body out of the blast radius. Roger’s balance, fall recovery and navigation run on Minerva Intelligence, the company’s own software stack; the decisions stay with the operator, who works from an office or from home.
The founders have the pedigree the pitch needs. CEO Sandor Felber worked on humanoid research at MIT CSAIL and contributed to Tesla’s Optimus programme. CTO Maurice Rahme spent six years at Boston Dynamics as a technical lead on Stretch, the box-moving robot that is arguably the only commercially deployed non-humanoid from that company’s catalogue. Minerva says it took a fully functional prototype from nothing in five months, and plans manufacturing in both Germany and the United States.
The round itself is small. Figure, 1X and Apptronik are raising at valuations three orders of magnitude above a $10 million pre-seed, and the investor list here — which also includes MVP Ventures, Kaya, RunwayVC, Compound, Founders Embassy, Hugging Face and Codecademy — reads as angel-heavy rather than institutional. What that buys is a prototype and a wedge, not a production line. Minerva has published no specification for Roger: no height, no payload, no teleoperation latency figure, no endurance number, and no named customer or pilot site in any of the four target industries. Those are the numbers that will decide whether an offshore operator lets the thing near a flare stack.
“People are dying every day doing jobs the rest of the world takes for granted. We set out to build a robot that lets them do the job efficiently from the comfort of their office or home.”
Sandor Felber, co-founder and CEO, Minerva Humanoids
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