A former Tesla scientist who helped build the intelligence behind Elon Musk’s Optimus robot wants to do it all again from Paris, only this time for Europe. Rémi Cadene, chief executive and co-founder of the startup UMA, has unveiled plans for a lightweight, AI-powered humanoid called Northstar, Bloomberg first reported.
he machine is being designed for manufacturing plants, logistics warehouses, and eventually homes. Cadene told Bloomberg that UMA is already in conversations with about 50 potential customers about how they might put it to work, and that Europe comes first before any push into the United States or Asia.
That framing matters, because the continent has spent the past year trying to prove it can win the humanoid race rather than cede the field to American and Chinese rivals. Cadene is not the first Optimus alumnus to strike out alone either, following others who left Tesla to build dexterous robot hands and rival systems.
Cadene’s own CV is arguably the strongest thing UMA has going for it. He spent roughly three years at Tesla, from 2021 to 2024, working on the AI behind Autopilot and building the first neural networks for Optimus, before joining Hugging Face to lead LeRobot, the open-source toolkit that became core infrastructure for robot learning worldwide.
He has surrounded himself with a similarly decorated founding team. It includes chief science officer Pierre Sermanet, a veteran of Google DeepMind and NYU, chief technology officer Simon Alibert, a LeRobot co-founder, and chief robot officer Robert Knight, the designer behind the widely used open-source SO-100 arm.
UMA, short for Universal Mechanical Assistant, emerged from stealth in December 2025 with an investor list that reads like a who’s who of the field. Backers include Greycroft, Red River West, Kima Ventures, and Factorial, while advisers include Meta’s chief AI scientist and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, alongside Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf.
The money behind it is harder to pin down. Before the public launch, Cadene was reported to be seeking around $40mn in seed funding, though UMA has not confirmed a final figure and the size of any closed round remains unclear.
What UMA has been concrete about is the shape of the product. According to its launch materials, the plan spans a mobile industrial robot with dual arms for warehouses and assembly lines, plus a more compact humanoid intended for human-oriented spaces such as hospitals, labs, and homes.
The company also says it will run several pilot programmes in logistics, manufacturing, and healthcare during 2026, positioning Northstar as a machine that can perceive, move, and manipulate objects in messy real settings rather than a stage-managed demo.
The strategy leans on Europe’s industrial base and its acute labour shortages, from warehouses with punishing staff turnover to healthcare systems short of millions of workers. Those gaps are exactly where humanoids for the home and the factory floor are being pitched hardest.
It is a crowded and richly funded arena. European peers such as Germany’s Neura Robotics and Stuttgart-based Sereact have raised heavily over the past year, while American leaders including Figure and 1X keep pushing deployment milestones and eye-watering valuations.
UMA’s wager is that a European team with open-source roots can move faster on the software than on the hardware, and that customers on the continent would rather buy a robot built closer to home.
Whether UMA can turn a supergroup of researchers into a shipping product is the open question, and it is the same one facing every humanoid startup burning cash on the promise of physical AI. For now, Cadene has a name, a team, a target market, and a robot that still has to prove it can walk the talk.
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