UMA

What the company builds

UMA — Universal Mechanical Assistant — is a Paris company building general-purpose mobile and humanoid robots. It first surfaced through job listings in November 2025 and exited stealth on 1 December 2025 with a Business Wire launch release. Its stated product plan covers two lines: a dual-arm mobile robot aimed at warehouses and assembly lines, and a more compact humanoid intended for human-oriented spaces such as hospitals, labs and homes.

On 7 July 2026, at the Machina Summit in Paris, UMA showed what CEO Rémi Cadène called "Prototype Version 0" and published the design of its first humanoid, Northstar. Public descriptions put Northstar at roughly 40 kg, with a visor in place of a face and a soft outer shell; a specialist robot tracker lists 165 cm in height, a 15 kg rated payload and 24 degrees of freedom, twelve of them in the hands. Cadène has been explicit that the biped is the long-term goal and that the first industrial product will be a wheeled, dexterous machine, with a concept prototype targeted for the end of 2026.

Technical approach

Alongside the hardware, UMA named the method behind it: Real-Time Learning, an architecture the company says lets robots acquire skills from demonstration rather than manual reprogramming, then improve through repetition. That is consistent with what the early recruitment posts implied — a sim-to-real pipeline, reinforcement and imitation learning, and in-house teleoperation for data collection. The team's lineage runs through LeRobot, the open-source robot-learning library Cadène led at Hugging Face and that CTO Simon Alibert co-founded.

People and backing

UMA was founded in 2025 by Cadène (CEO, previously Tesla Autopilot and Optimus), Pierre Sermanet (chief science officer, Google Brain and DeepMind), Robert Knight (chief robot officer, designer of the open-source SO-100 arm) and Alibert. Yann LeCun advises the company, as does Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf. Reported backers include Greycroft, Red River West, Kima Ventures and Factorial. The size of the round is the weakest part of the public record: a roughly $40 million seed has been reported, but the company has not confirmed a closed figure.

Traction and position

At the July unveiling UMA said it was in talks with about 50 potential customers, with pilot programmes in logistics, manufacturing and healthcare planned during 2026. Nothing has been publicly confirmed as deployed. Cadène frames the opportunity as European labour shortage rather than consumer robotics, and has drawn contrasts with incumbents — arguing that Unitree's low-cost humanoids largely serve the research market and that his former employer's Optimus programme remains at proof-of-concept stage. UMA sits in a Paris cluster that has thickened quickly, including LeCun's own AMI Labs, and its credibility currently rests on team pedigree and one prototype rather than on shipped units.