A Former Tesla Optimus Engineer Is Betting Europe Can Build Its Own Robots

Rémi Cadène, a former Tesla Optimus engineer, launched UMA's humanoid robot Northstar at the Machina Summit in Paris, targeting European factories first. The startup emerged from stealth with a $40 million seed round backed by Greycroft, Relentless, and Unity Growth, and counts Yann LeCun among its investors. UMA aims to address Europe's aging workforce and high labor costs, betting on regional demand over the US-centric strategies of competitors like Figure and Apptronik.

Rémi Cadène helped build Tesla's Optimus. Now his Paris startup UMA has unveiled Northstar, a humanoid robot aimed at Europe's factories before anywhere else. Rémi Cadène spent years inside Tesla, first on Autopilot, then on the Optimus humanoid program. On July 7, at the Machina Summit inside Station F in Paris, one day ahead of the RAISE Summit, he showed what he built after leaving: Northstar, the debut robot from his own company, UMA. According to Bloomberg, Cadène said the machine will target European customers first, a decision that runs against nearly every other humanoid robot company chasing US warehouse and factory contracts. UMA is not a garage project. It emerged from stealth on December 1, 2025, with a $40 million seed round backed by Greycroft, Relentless and Unity Growth, according to a release distributed on Businesswire. The check came with a roster of individual believers that reads like a who's who of AI: Yann LeCun, Olivier Pomel and Thomas Wolf all put in money. Cadène didn't build this alone. His co-founders include Pierre Sermanet, who spent years on deep learning and robotics research at Google DeepMind. Simon Alibert co-founded the open-source LeRobot project with Cadène while both were at Hugging Face. And Robert Knight has designed humanoid robots for more than 25 years. That's not a founding team assembled for a pitch deck. It's a team that has already shipped robotics work the rest of the industry actually uses. LeRobot matters here more than it might first appear. Cadène built it at Hugging Face as an open-source library for training robots on real-world data, and it has since become infrastructure that labs and startups across the field rely on. Bringing that pedigree into a private venture gives UMA a credibility that most first-time robotics founders don't get. Figure, Apptronik and 1X have all raised big rounds chasing the same customers: US logistics giants and car plants that want humanoids on the floor within a year or two. UMA is going the other way. The company says it has already talked to roughly 50 potential customers and visited several factories to understand what they actually need, according to reporting from Usine Nouvelle. The initial focus is industrial and logistics work, with pilot programs planned in manufacturing and logistics, and in healthcare later in 2026. Europe's case for building its own humanoid isn't sentimental. The continent has an aging workforce and high labor costs: a dense base of manufacturers is already short on hands. Cadène is betting that reality creates real demand, not just a talking point about strategic autonomy from the US and China, who currently dominate the humanoid race. France's own defense establishment has separately pushed hard on the idea that relying on foreign-built AI and robotics platforms is a liability, not just an inconvenience. UMA doesn't need to make that argument explicitly. A robot built, trained and sold in Europe, for European factories, makes it for them. Fifty conversations with potential customers is not fifty contracts. It's worth saying plainly: nobody has confirmed a signed deal, a delivery date or a price for Northstar. That gap between interest and revenue is exactly where the humanoid robotics field has struggled before. Tesla has pushed back its own Optimus production targets more than once. Figure has shown slick demo videos without disclosing firm commercial volumes. A pipeline of curious factory managers is a real signal, but it is an early one. Still, the timing isn't an accident. UMA picked Machina, a new physical AI summit that launched in Paris this year specifically to give European robotics and embodied AI companies a stage of their own, rather than a booth at a US trade show. That choice says something about who Cadène thinks his first customers are and where he wants UMA to be seen as a national, not niche, project. What happens next depends on whether those fifty conversations turn into pilot deployments UMA can point to by the end of 2026. If Northstar shows up on a real factory floor doing real work, UMA becomes the first credible European name in a field that has so far been a two-country contest. If it doesn't, Cadène will have proven only that Tesla pedigree buys attention, not customers. Also read: Quaise Energy raises $144 million to drill for superhot geothermal power https://startupfortune.com/quaise-energy-raises-144-million-to-drill-for-superhot-geothermal-power/ • Defense tech funding has doubled this year as investors bet on autonomy https://startupfortune.com/defense-tech-funding-has-doubled-this-year-as-investors-bet-on-autonomy/ • DeepSeek Chose Huawei's Chips Over Building Its Own In-House Silicon https://startupfortune.com/deepseek-chose-huaweis-chips-over-building-its-own-in-house-silicon/