Austin-based robotics company spun out of the Human Centered Robotics Lab at UT Austin. The team that built NASA's Valkyrie robot now builds Apollo, targeting a $50K price point at scale. Partnered with Mercedes-Benz and GXO for industrial deployment.
History
Apptronik was born from the Human Centered Robotics Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, where the team built NASA's Valkyrie humanoid robot. Co-founders Nick Paine and Jeff Cardenas left UT Austin in 2016 to commercialize the technology. The NASA heritage gave them a 15-year head start in actuator design and whole-body control. Apollo, their flagship humanoid, inherited Valkyrie's innovative series-elastic actuators and swappable battery system. Partnerships with Mercedes-Benz and GXO validated the commercial approach, and the target price of $50K at scale could make Apollo one of the most accessible enterprise humanoids.
Apptronik
A modular general-purpose humanoid designed for affordable industrial deployment with a focus on heavy lifting. Apollo stands 173 cm tall with swappable battery packs providing 4 hours of runtime. Built by the NASA Valkyrie team. Targets a sub-$50K price point at scale with partnerships including Mercedes-Benz and GXO. Apollo is purpose-built for carrying heavy loads — up to 25 kg sustained — in warehouse and manufacturing environments.
Apptronik
The second generation of Apptronik's industrial humanoid, Apollo 2 adds 12-DOF dexterous hands, an upgraded compute module with on-device LLM inference, and extends battery life to 6 hours.