Northstar from Paris: An Optimus developer is now building Europe's humanoid

For three years, Rémi Cadene worked at Tesla on the AI behind Autopilot and on the first neural networks for Optimus. On July 7, the Frenchman showed in Paris what he has made of it: Northstar, a lightweight, AI-driven humanoid that his startup UMA wants to bring to Europe first. Only after that will the USA and Asia follow.

The presentation at the Machina Summit encompassed more than just a robot model. UMA also presented a learning architecture that will allow robots to learn new skills by demonstration rather than through complex programming. This is exactly what Cadene is known for in the scene. After leaving Tesla, he built the open-source library LeRobot at Hugging Face, which collected over 12,000 stars on GitHub within a year and is now in use in robotics labs worldwide.

The team he has assembled reads like a who's who of the field. Chief Research Officer Pierre Sermanet comes from Google DeepMind, Chief Technology Officer Simon Alibert helped develop LeRobot, and Chief Designer Rob Knight designed the widely-used open-source robotic arm SO-100. Meta's AI Chief Scientist Yann LeCun and Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf serve as advisors. Before the public launch, Cadene is said to have sought around 40 million dollars in seed capital, though UMA has not yet confirmed a final figure.

Two machines are concretely planned: a mobile industrial robot with two arms for warehouses and assembly lines, as well as a more compact humanoid for environments where people work, such as hospitals and laboratories. UMA plans to launch pilot projects in logistics, manufacturing, and healthcare this year. According to the company, discussions are already underway with around 50 potential customers.

The fact that another European heavyweight is entering the ring changes the landscape on the continent. Neura Robotics has just strengthened Zurich as a development location with its billion-dollar round, Sereact from Stuttgart has raised significant capital, and from the USA, Figure and 1X are pushing into the market with high valuations. UMA's bet is: European customers prefer to buy a robot built nearby, and a team with open-source roots can move faster in software than the competition can catch up in hardware.

Whether the researcher supergroup becomes a company that actually delivers robots remains an open question. That question is currently facing every humanoid company living on the promise of physical AI. Cadene at least has a name, a team, and a clear target market. Northstar now has to learn to walk on its own.