Wandercraft

From rehabilitation floors to factory floors

Wandercraft is a Paris-founded robotics company built around one narrow, hard capability: dynamic, self-balancing bipedal walking. Founded in 2012 by engineers out of École Polytechnique, it spent its first decade applying that control stack to medical exoskeletons — Atalante, and its successor Atalante X, a hands-free rehabilitation device used in hospital and clinic settings — before extending the same platform to a personal device, Eve, and to industrial humanoids. The company runs a second corporate base in New York, where CEO and co-founder Matthieu Masselin relocated in late 2022; it remains privately held, with Renault Group among its shareholders.

The Calvin platform

The industrial line began in June 2025, when the company unveiled the Calvin humanoid alongside a Renault partnership that combined a minority investment with a co-development plan. Calvin-40 is deliberately unlike most general-purpose humanoids: it has no head, with cameras and sensors mounted lower on the torso, and it is rated to carry payloads of up to 40 kilograms — roughly double the figure quoted for Tesla's Optimus or Figure's Figure 02. The company says the first unit was assembled in 40 days by reusing actuation and balance software already qualified for medical use. End-effectors are modular, ranging from suction grippers to dexterous hands, and the robot accepts voice commands.

Management has been explicit that this is not a bet on generality. "We don't believe in building a general-purpose robot and hoping customers figure out how to use it," Masselin said when the company signed Italian Tier 1 supplier SAPA as its second industrial customer.

Traction and capital

Wandercraft closed a Series D in June 2025 that it described as $75 million in equity and debt — reported in Europe as €64.3 million — with Renault Group, the French state-backed PSIM fund via Bpifrance, Teampact Ventures and Quadrant Management participating. In March 2026 Renault said at its futuREady strategy day that it would deploy 350 Calvin units by 2027, with the robot already working a tire-handling line at the Douai plant. In September 2026 the company said it had signed 12 customers for Calvin-40 across automotive, logistics, retail, healthcare and defence, and Bloomberg reported it was seeking roughly €100 million at a €750 million pre-money valuation with Goldman Sachs advising.

The medical business continues in parallel and remains the source of its regulatory track record: Atalante X is deployed in more than 150 rehabilitation centres worldwide, gained a CE mark expansion in September 2025 and a second FDA indication extension in November 2025, and cleared Ecuador's ARCSA in July 2026. Eve received FDA clearance on 11 August 2026 for eligible wheelchair users with spinal cord injuries, with a US commercial launch set for 17 September 2026 under Medicare billing code K1007.

Where it sits

Among European humanoid developers, Wandercraft is unusual in reaching production customers through an existing regulated hardware business rather than from a standing start, and in competing on payload and ergonomics rather than dexterity or general autonomy.