Persona AI

What it builds

Persona AI is a Houston robotics company building humanoid robots for heavy industry rather than warehouses or homes. The company describes a modular bipedal platform intended for welding, grinding, inspection, material handling and equipment maintenance across shipyards, steel shops, ports, construction sites and energy infrastructure, and says the design is meant to use tools and walk surfaces built for human workers. It was founded in 2024 by Nicolaus Radford (CEO), Jerry Pratt (CTO) and Jide Akinyode (COO). Radford led the NASA team behind the Valkyrie humanoid and previously founded Nauticus Robotics; Pratt spent two decades on walking robots at IHMC and served as CTO of Figure before joining.

Shipyards first

The company's anchor customer relationship is with HD Hyundai. The two sides began with a memorandum of understanding in May 2025 alongside Korean integrator Vazil Company, then escalated to a formal joint development agreement signed at HD Hyundai's Pangyo R&D centre in March 2026, with HD KSOE supplying welding training data, HD Hyundai Robotics handling system integration and Persona AI responsible for the bipedal platform. Persona also signed an MOU with the American Bureau of Shipping in September 2025 to define how robot-collected inspection data could be used for certification. Hardware milestones have followed: a teleoperated, untethered weld at a Houston industrial facility in July 2026, and crated units shipped to South Korea in August for integration work ahead of Gen 3 deliveries targeted for the end of that year.

Funding, hiring and adjacent deals

Persona raised a $27 million pre-seed announced in May 2025, co-led by Unity Growth and Tides Ventures with Mirae Asset Group and roughly a dozen other funds participating, and has said it is pursuing a robotics-as-a-service model. It operates a development centre at the Ion innovation hub in Houston. Staffing has skewed toward commercialisation: Brian Davis, formerly of Amazon Robotics, joined as Head of Global Manufacturing in March 2026, the same month Michael Perry, previously of DJI, Boston Dynamics and Dexterity, was named Head of Commercial Strategy. The company has also announced an agreement with POSCO Group covering steel manufacturing, a pilot with the state of Louisiana at SSE Steel Fabrication, and a distribution and market-development partnership with Singapore's dConstruct Robotics for Asia-Pacific. A separate R&D tie-up with Under Armour on protective textiles produced treads that were tested during a walk outside its Houston office.

Position

Persona AI is one of a small group aiming humanoids at welding and fabrication rather than logistics; Italy's Generative Bionics is pursuing a comparable path with Fincantieri in European shipyards, and Korean industrial groups are backing several parallel efforts. Its work remains at the prototype and pilot stage: publicly confirmed demonstrations have been teleoperated, and no volume deliveries, revenue figures or headcount have been disclosed.