Minerva exits stealth with Roger, a hazmat humanoid
The company says a specialist drives the robot from a command post, and it is not pitching full autonomy.
Minerva Humanoids came out of stealth with $10M in pre-seed funding led by General Catalyst. The robot is called Roger, and it is aimed at oil and gas, explosive ordnance disposal and hazardous material response.
The pitch is that the human stays out of the blast radius. Minerva calls Roger semi-autonomous, with the specialist's judgment and hands on the task while their body sits in a command post far from the danger. In its own launch post the company put the position plainly, saying "No full autonomy needed." That is teleoperation (a human controlling the robot remotely) framed as the product, not as a gap to be closed later.
No full autonomy needed.
Who is behind it
According to @lukas_m_ziegler, who is an angel investor in the round, Minerva was founded by CEO Sandor Felber and CTO Maurice Rahme, with first paid pilots launching this fall. The rest of the investor list includes Long Journey VC, Credo Ventures and MVP Ventures.
Ziegler laid out the market case in his post. Every 75 minutes an energy worker somewhere in the world is killed on the job, roughly 7,000 deaths a year. He also says NATO consistently identifies EOD and hazmat response teams as the highest-risk segment in every unit, and that those teams rely on decades-old wheeled, single-arm robots that lack the dexterity for complex tasks. That is the opening Minerva is going after with two arms and hands instead of one arm on wheels.
a purpose-built semi-autonomous humanoid that puts the specialist's judgment and hands on the task while keeping their body in a command post far from the danger
Ziegler has spent more than two years deploying quadrupeds, drones and mobile robots in energy and oil and gas, and says he is now on the other side of the table.
Shown versus claimed
Minerva says it went from idea to walking in 5 months. What the sources do not contain is any measured task performance, any detail on how much of Roger's motion is driven by the operator versus handled onboard, or any named pilot customer. The first paid pilots are still ahead, so nobody outside the company has seen Roger do an EOD or hazmat job yet.
The interesting part is the framing. Most humanoid companies this year have sold autonomy as the destination and treated teleop as something to apologise for. Minerva is selling the human in the loop as the safety argument, because the customer buying it cares about getting a person away from the thing that might kill them, not about whether a policy ran end to end.