Apollo just pulled up with a war chest heavy enough to bend gravity. Apptronik closed a $520M Series A extension, stacking on top of the $350M Series A announced in February 2025. That brings the Series A total to $935M and total funding to roughly $963M when you add the earlier $28M. Valuation now sits in the $5B–$5.5B+ range depending on which tier 1 outlet you read. Either way, that is not a science project. That is scale.
Congratulations to Jeff Cardenas, Co Founder and CEO, and Nicholas Paine, Co Founder and CTO. Built out of the Human Centered Robotics Lab at the University of Texas at Austin alongside Luis Sentis, this company did not just appear in the humanoid hype cycle. They spent nearly a decade building 15 robotic systems, including work on NASA’s Valkyrie, before unveiling Apollo. That is reps. That is scar tissue. That is how you earn the right to raise almost a billion dollars.
The 2025 round was co led by B Capital and Capital Factory, with participation from Google. The extension brought in heavyweights including Google and Mercedes Benz, alongside institutional capital like Qatar Investment Authority, AT and T Ventures, and John Deere. When your cap table reads like a Davos dinner seating chart, it is because real industry intends to deploy real robots.
Apollo is designed for logistics, manufacturing, and retail. Human scale. Industrial grade. Built to move in the same spaces we do. Partnerships with Mercedes Benz and GXO Logistics signal something important. This is not about dancing demos. This is about factories, fulfillment centers, and repetitive tasks that quietly drain margin. Add the collaboration with Google DeepMind and Gemini based robotics AI, and now you are pairing physical capability with frontier intelligence.
Headcount has nearly doubled from over 150 employees in early 2025 to nearly 300. Plans include a robot training and data collection facility in Austin and a California office. Translation: build the brain, scale the body, tighten the loop.
There is a lesson here for founders watching from the sidelines. Apptronik raised only $28M before locking in $350M. Capital efficiency buys you leverage. Deep technical roots buy you credibility. Commercial agreements with names like Mercedes Benz buy you time.
Humanoid robotics has been promised for decades. Apptronik is treating it like an operations problem, not a sci fi trailer. In a world starving for labor and obsessed with productivity, a humanoid that can lift, sort, and collaborate without redesigning the entire warehouse starts to look less like spectacle and more like infrastructure.
Jeff Cardenas and Nicholas Paine are not selling robots. They are selling throughput, resilience, and a future where labor shortages meet silicon muscle. The capital is fuel. The real question is how fast Apollo walks into the world and how many industries decide they would rather hire a robot that never clocks out.
