RoboForce Raises $2M to Deploy TITAN — a 210cm Industrial Humanoid Robot

The humanoid robotics funding wave keeps building. RoboForce, a startup founded by veterans of CMU, Tesla, Amazon Robotics, and Waymo, has closed a $2 million oversubscribed seed round to accelerate the deployment of TITAN — a 210cm general-purpose humanoid engineered for the dirtiest, most dangerous industrial jobs on the planet. The raise brings the company's total funding to $7 million.

A Who's Who of Investors

The round was led by YZi Labs and drew a roster of high-profile backers that underscores the growing institutional confidence in physical AI. Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, joined alongside Myron Scholes, the Nobel Laureate economist, Gary Rieschel, and Carnegie Mellon University — one of the world's foremost robotics research institutions. The oversubscription signals that TITAN is not just a lab experiment; investors believe it can compete for real industrial contracts at scale.

Meet TITAN: Built to Tower Over the Factory Floor

At 210 centimeters tall, TITAN is one of the largest humanoid robots designed for commercial deployment. Its proportions aren't a gimmick — they're purpose-built for environments where reach, payload, and endurance are everything. Key specifications include a 40kg payload capacity, 1,100mm arm reachability, and an 8-hour battery runtime that keeps TITAN productive across a full industrial shift without stopping for a recharge. The humanoid form factor is a deliberate choice: it lets TITAN operate in spaces designed for human workers — no expensive retrofitting of facilities required.

Target Environments: Where Humans Don't Want to Be

RoboForce is aiming TITAN squarely at the "3D" jobs — dull, dirty, and dangerous. The company has identified six primary verticals: solar farms (panel installation, inspection, and cleaning), data centers (rack handling, cable management, physical maintenance), mining (material transport in hazardous underground environments), shipping and logistics (loading, unloading, sortation), manufacturing (assembly line tasks requiring strength and precision), and general logistics. These are sectors facing chronic labor shortages and where the cost of human injury is both human and financial.

"TITAN is designed to go where humans shouldn't have to — and to do it reliably, shift after shift."

— RoboForce, Fundraising Announcement

The Team Behind the Machine

Pedigree matters in deep tech, and RoboForce's founding team reads like a robotics all-star lineup. Engineers from Carnegie Mellon University's world-renowned Robotics Institute bring cutting-edge research in locomotion and manipulation. Tesla Optimus and Amazon Robotics veterans contribute hard-won experience in scaling robots from lab to production line. Waymo alumni round out the team with expertise in autonomous systems and sensor fusion. This blend of academic rigor and industrial-scale execution experience is exactly what it takes to move a humanoid robot from prototype to deployed asset.

Physical AI at an Inflection Point

RoboForce's raise arrives at a moment when the industrial humanoid market is accelerating rapidly. Figure AI, Agility Robotics, Apptronik, and 1X Technologies are all competing for contracts in warehouses and factories. What differentiates TITAN is its explicit targeting of the most extreme environments — solar farms baking under desert sun, underground mining shafts, and high-density data center aisles — rather than the relatively controlled conditions of an automotive assembly line. The 8-hour runtime and 40kg payload are specs that speak directly to what operators in these sectors need.