Minerva Humanoids emerges from stealth with $10M pre-seed to build humanoids for the world's most dangerous jobs
The San Francisco startup's semi-autonomous humanoid ‘Roger’ is designed for oil rigs and bomb disposal — keeping a remote specialist's judgment in the loop via VR teleoperation.
Minerva Humanoids, a San Francisco robotics startup founded at the end of 2025, emerged from stealth on October 6 with approximately $10 million in pre-seed funding, according to a company announcement. The round was led by General Catalyst, with Long Journey Ventures and Credo Ventures as co-leads and participation from investors including Hugging Face, Codecademy, MVP Ventures and Tiny Ventures. The money arrives as the company launches its first paid pilots this fall.
The product is Roger, a purpose-built semi-autonomous humanoid aimed at jobs the company describes as the world's most dangerous: work on onshore and offshore oil and gas sites, explosive ordnance disposal and hazardous-material response. Rather than pursuing full autonomy, Minerva keeps a trained specialist in control: the operator wears a VR headset, sees through the robot's eyes and performs fine manipulation remotely, while the company's Minerva Intelligence software handles balance, fall recovery and navigation. The pitch is that the specialist's judgment stays on the device while their body stays out of the danger zone.
The founding pair brings relevant hardware pedigrees. CEO Sandor Felber previously worked on MIT CSAIL's humanoid robotics research line and on Tesla's Optimus program; CTO Maurice Rahme spent six years at Boston Dynamics as a technical lead on the Stretch warehouse robot. Minerva says it went from idea to a walking prototype in five months, builds its first Roger units in Sindelfingen, Germany, and plans production across Germany and the United States on what it calls a Western industrial base, without reliance on single-source Chinese components. It has also shown the system at NATO's Explosive Ordnance Disposal Centre of Excellence and signed research partnerships with MBZUAI and the University of Waterloo. The standard caveats apply: everything about Roger's capabilities, timelines and the ~7,000 annual energy-worker deaths framing is the company's own telling, and no independent test results have been published.