Bleu Robotics raises €5 million to train industrial humanoids with less data

Bleu Robotics, a Paris-based startup developing AI models for industrial humanoid robots, has closed a €5 million pre-Seed round, according to EU-Startups. The company aims to shorten the entire humanoid robot deployment process to one hour or less. Sifted reports that the startup is promising to deploy industrial humanoids after around 20 minutes of training.

The round was co-led by Contrarian Ventures and OVNI Capital, with participation from Kvanted, WEPA Ventures, Motier Ventures, Charlie Songhurst and board members at Meta.

Co-founder Benoît Berkoukchi told EU-Startups that humanoid robots in manufacturing represent the next automotive sector and could help Europe and the US reshore production. He argued that most robotics firms try to train humanoids using millions of data points to build fully general-purpose models, an approach he said is ill-suited to manufacturing because there is not enough factory-work data, and internet-scale datasets of the kind used to build large language models will not exist for robots for a long time. He said the company's methodology allows it to do more with less.