Two-year-old British startup Humanoid has signed a deal to integrate “a four-digit number of humanoid robots into live manufacturing operations” at German industrial giant Schaeffler’s factories starting later this year. The bigger news, however, might be that Humanoid has committed to buying a “seven-digit number of actuators” from Schaeffler over the term of the agreement, suggesting that Humanoid intends to ship a staggering 100,000 humanoid robots across all of its clients over the next five years.
Four months ago, Schaeffler and a two-year-old British startup called Humanoid announced they’d put “several hundred” humanoid robots into the German industrial giant’s factories over the next five to six years. Something must be working in that deal, because on Wednesday, the two companies upgraded the number significantly and signed an agreement to integrate at least 1,000 – and potentially many more – humanoid robots into Schaeffler’s manufacturing operations.
That somewhat vague but certainly big number of working machines makes this one of the largest disclosed humanoid robot rollouts to date, and arguably the most aggressive escalation we’ve seen so far between a humanoid OEM and an industrial customer.
The caveat on the bigger numbers?
According to the terms of the agreement, the companies have until 2032 to put the full 4-digit complement of humanoid robot workers in their jobs. That means that while there’s clearly some level of value to Humanoid’s digital workers today, the UK company has almost six years of upgrades to apply to make its robots better and better before the full contract requirements need to be satisfied.
“We have already seen strong results from our proof of concept together, and now we are taking the next step to staged deployment,” Humanoid founder and CEO Artem Sokolov said in a statement. “Moving into real-world operations is where the true value of humanoid robots is proven.”
But there’s potentially a much bigger story here, and it’s about Humanoid’s unit shipment plans over the next five years. As part of the deal, Humanoid is agreeing to make Schaeffler its key supplier for actuators – the motors that make humanoid robots move – over the next five years. That supply agreement indicates that Schaeffler will become Humanoid’s preferred supplier, covering more than 50% of the company’s demand for joint actuators for its wheeled-based platforms through 2031. Revealingly, however, this partnership is expected to translate into the supply of a “seven-digit number of actuators.”
That’s at least one million actuators, and it allows us to make some educated guesses about how many robots might need a million joint actuators.
The wheeled HMND 01 Alpha offers close to 30 active degrees of freedom, excluding end-effectors. Any wheel base actuators are likely not Schaeffler’s as those are typically different hardware (BLDC hub motors or similar). Similarly, any hand actuators are almost certainly not Schaeffler’s either, as dexterous hands use specialized micro-actuators. But joint actuators in the arms, shoulders, torso and neck are most likely to be Schaeffler’s. So the “Schaeffler-relevant” actuator count per wheeled HMND 01 is probably roughly 18–22 joint actuators per robot.
At 100% Schaeffler coverage, 20 actuators per robot means Humanoid is shipping 50,000 robots. At 50% coverage, which is what the contract stipulates, that’s 100,000 robots over the next five years. Significantly, that’s at the very lowest possible end for the “at least one million actuators” contract language.
Whatever way you slice it, Humanoid and Schaeffler are betting big on the UK company’s ability to produce and sell a very significant number of humanoid robots.
Phase one of the contract runs from December 2026 through June 2027 across two Schaeffler sites in Germany. At the Herzogenaurach facility Humanoid will focus on box-handling inside a live production environment. At Schweinfurt, the deployment starts with a three-month capability demonstration and integration test, followed by three months on-site to validate “stable, continuous operation approaching full production scale.”
The agreement is structured as Robot-as-a-Service, with Humanoid providing fleet management software, maintenance, 24/7 support and ongoing performance management bundled in.
Schaeffler’s Chief Operating Officer Jochen Schroeder framed the deal in terms of Schaeffler’s broader play.
“The partnership with Humanoid underscores Schaeffler’s position as a trusted technology partner in advanced robotics. By supporting the phased deployment of humanoid systems in real manufacturing environments and serving as a preferred supplier of actuators, we are contributing to the industrial scaling of this technology.”
The wheeled-only focus is also worth flagging.
Humanoid has both wheeled and bipedal HMND 01 platforms – its wheeled platform is almost certainly much more mature at this point – and the Schaeffler contract is exclusively wheeled. As Schaeffler’s Andreas Zeug, project manager for humanoid robotics, told Interesting Engineering at CES: “For industrial use, we have completely even floors, so we don’t need legs.” The bipedal debate isn’t exactly settled, but most of the industrial and logistic humanoid robot experts I’ve talked to, including Tutor Intelligence in Boston, say wheels are vastly better than legs for most jobs.
Humanoid, legally SKL Robotics Ltd., was founded by Sokolov in 2024 and unveiled the HMND 01 Alpha, a 220 cm wheeled industrial humanoid, in September 2025 after a seven-month development cycle the company says is the fastest in the industry. The startup is operating on $50 million in founder-led capital and has roughly 200 engineers across London, Boston, and Vancouver, with alumni from Apple, Tesla, Google, Boston Dynamics, Sanctuary AI, and Nvidia.
A big part of this story, however, is about Schaeffler.
Schaeffler CEO Klaus Rosenfeld told Reuters earlier this month that the company is now engaged with roughly 45 humanoid robotics players worldwide and expects its humanoid robotics division to secure an order book in the hundreds of millions of euros by 2030. Schaeffler estimates that its hardware portfolio including strain wave gears, planetary gear actuators, sensors and bearings represents roughly 50% of the bill of materials in a typical humanoid, and the company is targeting roughly 10% of that addressable market.
Of course, what’s interesting about this is that Schaeffler is simultaneously one of the most aggressive industrial adopters of humanoids and a preferred component supplier for the platforms it’s buying. Schaeffler is now committed to buying thousands of humanoid robots from Humanoid, at least 1,000 from Switzerland’s Hexagon Robotics under an April 2026 deal, plus an even bigger partnership with Germany’s Neura Robotics that could run to 4,000-6,000 of Neura’s 4NE1 models.
With circular deals like these, Schaeffler is essentially becoming the Nvidia of humanoid robotics: investing in the success of its customers.
