Europe builds its own humanoids: who, for whom and with whose money

On 7 September the German robot maker NEURA Robotics and the Italian electronics group SECO announced a strategic partnership: SECO will design, engineer and manufacture the electronic compute modules for NEURA's cognitive robots, including the 4NE1 humanoid, on Qualcomm Dragonwing processors. NEURA's founder and CEO David Reger said: “Physical AI will not be built by one company alone. It requires an ecosystem across sensing, compute, cloud and industrialization.” Behind that sentence sits a pattern worth understanding before you compare offers: European humanoids are mostly built next to an industrial customer that also supplies parts, and sometimes funds the development. This article maps who builds what, for whom, and which numbers are stated plans rather than deliveries.

Who builds what, and for whom

Humanoids Daily's September survey of European makers lists seven companies: NEURA Robotics, Agile Robots, Humanoid, Wandercraft, Hexagon, Generative Bionics and UMA. The table covers the five where the industrial partner is named in the companies' or the partners' own statements.

Agile Robots of Munich, which presented its Agile ONE humanoid in November 2025, and the Paris start-up UMA are not in the table: the sources we read name no industrial customer for either, and Humanoids Daily reports no deployed UMA units.

When the customer is also the supplier

The clearest case is Schaeffler, the German motion-technology group. In three of the five deals above it appears in more than one role:

• NEURA 4 November 2025: Schaeffler plans a mid-four-digit number of humanoids by 2035 and develops and supplies key components such as actuators; CNBC also lists Schaeffler among the Series C investors.
• Hexagon 22 April 2026: at least 1,000 AEON robots across Schaeffler's production network by 2032, with Schaeffler supplying the actuators.
• Humanoid 13 May 2026: a binding, phased deployment and supply agreement, and Schaeffler as preferred actuator supplier for more than 50% of Humanoid's demand through 2031, as stated by Humanoid. Schaeffler then joined the July Series A.

Others follow the same shape. Bosch's robotics subsidiary will act as contract manufacturer for Humanoid, and Bosch took part in its Series A; CNBC lists Bosch among NEURA's Series C investors. Renault took a stake in Wandercraft in 2025 and is the buyer named for the 350 Calvin robots. For a buyer this means that a maker's order book, its parts supply and its capital may all lead back to the same company.

Every figure in the table is a plan or a commitment stated by the parties, not a delivery count. Schaeffler's 2032 and 2035 horizons are deployment targets, and none of the sources we read reports that these quantities have been delivered. Humanoid also says it holds 34,000 robot pre-orders worth nearly $2.5 billion; The Next Web notes that the figure is independently unverified.

Whose money

Two funding rounds show the scale and the same pattern of strategic investors:

NEURA's Series C was led by Tether with Qualcomm, Amazon, NVIDIA, Bosch, Schaeffler and the European Investment Bank, and CNBC reports that the full amount depends on NEURA reaching certain milestones. Humanoid's Series A was led by Prime Movers Lab with Schaeffler, Bosch, Fubon and Aglaé Ventures, bringing its total raised to $270 million. We leave valuations out: they were reported from unnamed sources or differ between outlets.

What the SECO deal adds

The announcement covers compute modules, a NEURA Gym in Italy that NEURA calls its first training hub in Southern Europe, and joint collection of data from industrial deployments. Humanoids Daily reads it with a caveat: every maker in its survey runs NVIDIA, Qualcomm or AMD silicon, so building the modules in Europe addresses assembly but not the dependence on the chip supplier. The same question arises on the Chinese side of the market, where it concerns the origin of the robot rather than of the processor: our rules-of-origin checklist covers it, and the Šabac line is described in the opening report and the look inside the line.

What this changes when you compare offers

None of this makes a European robot better or worse than an offer from anywhere else. It changes what a buyer should ask:

• Which task was it built around? Hexagon's AEON is set for production tasks at BMW in Leipzig, and Renault's Calvin is being tested on tyres at Douai. Ask for the task list and what was proven on it.
• Where do the joints come from? Actuators often come from the anchor customer. Ask which components are supplied by a customer's group, and what happens to your delivery if that customer's own demand grows.
• Plans or units? Ask for deployed units with dates, not framework agreements.
• Whose data is it? NEURA and Schaeffler say they generate production data for NEURA's Neuraverse. Ask who owns, and may reuse, data collected on your floor.
• The same questions for every quote Put them to a Chinese-platform offer as well, together with the origin checklist.

What we'll watch

The dated milestones in the sources are close: the first phase of the Humanoid deployment at Schaeffler, which the company puts at December 2026 to June 2027, and around ten Calvin robots at Renault and AEON in BMW production, both by the end of 2026. Each would move a figure in the table from plan to delivery.

Sources

• NEURA Robotics, 7 September 2026 — NEURA Robotics and SECO Join Forces to Scale Physical AI from Europe
• Evertiq, 9 September 2026 — NEURA Robotics and SECO partner to scale humanoid robot production in Europe
• Humanoids Daily, September 2026 — The humanoids of Europe
• CNBC, 10 June 2026 — Humanoid robotics company raises up to $1.4 billion from Nvidia, Amazon and others
• NEURA Robotics, 4 November 2025 — Schaeffler and NEURA Robotics technology partnership
• The Robot Report, April 2026 — Schaeffler plans to deploy 1,000 Hexagon humanoids by 2032
• Hexagon Robotics, 12 June 2026 — New milestone with BMW Group: industrial humanoid deployment
• Humanoid, 13 May 2026 — Humanoid secures landmark deal with Schaeffler
• The Next Web, July 2026 — Humanoid raises $152M Series A, with Bosch set to manufacture its wheeled robots
• Renault Group — Calvin, a new generation robot is born
• autoevolution, February 2026 — Gene.01 humanoid and the Fincantieri welding job