Embodied AI unveils AIR, a humanoid robot built to work next to factory workers

Look AI Ventures portfolio company Embodied AI, a Swiss EPFL spin-out, unveiled its first humanoid robot, AIR, at Humanoid Europe 2026 in Munich on 6 November 2026. AIR is designed to work right next to people on the production line, without a safety cage.

Tesla and Figure AI are pouring billions into humanoid robots. Embodied AI, a 25-person startup from Lausanne, is taking a different route: instead of betting on one giant general-purpose robot brain, it puts a safe robot on the production line now, makes it useful from day one, and lets it learn the job as it works.

CEO Francesco Stella presented AIR at Humanoid Europe 2026 in Munich.

What is AIR?

AIR is a humanoid robot with a body and two arms on a wheeled base, built for manual, high-variation tasks that conventional industrial robots can’t automate. Factories across Europe still do many of these tasks by hand, and they are increasingly short of workers to do them.

How is AIR different from other industrial robots?

Most industrial robots are too heavy and rigid to work near people, so they are kept behind fences or other safety barriers. AIR is designed differently:

• Safety built in, not added on. The heavy parts sit in the torso, and the soft, light arms give way on contact, so AIR is designed to work beside people without a cage. CE marking is planned for 2027, as the EU’s new machinery rules take effect.
• Useful from the first shift. At first, a remote operator runs the robot, so the factory gets value immediately.
• Learning on paid work, not in the lab. Every shift becomes training data, and within a month the robot takes the task over on its own.
• Built for real workloads. Depending on the task, one AIR can handle the workload of up to three people per shift.

AIR runs on the same AI stack that is already doing paid work on a customer’s production line in Embodied AI’s two-arm robot cell. In paid pilots with large manufacturers, including a leading consumer electronics manufacturer and a global automotive and industrial technology supplier, Embodied AI’s robots reach an average success rate of 95%.

Why Look AI Ventures invested in Embodied AI

“Physical AI has a safety problem. Most robots built for factories are too heavy and too rigid to share a line with people, so they end up behind fences (and that’s a big problem). Embodied AI took the opposite route: a 2 kg tendon-driven arm that lifts 5 kg, deployed in one week and reaching an average 95% task success rate within a month. Safety by design, not by distance. That’s why we backed the team at Embodied AI,” said Angelo Burgarello, Partner at Look AI Ventures.

Who is behind Embodied AI?

Embodied AI is a spin-out of EPFL, headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, with an office in Rome. It is led by 28-year-old CEO Francesco Stella, who earned his PhD in robotics at EPFL, did research at MIT, and was featured in Forbes Italia’s Under 30. His co-founders are CTO Kai Junge, who trained at Cambridge and EPFL, and COO Max Polzin, previously a tech lead at Seervision, a startup later acquired by Q-SYS.

The company is backed by an international group of investors including Faber VC, Look AI Ventures, Techshop Capital, Vento, Plug and Play, Kickfund, and Excellis.

“If an AI system recommends the wrong product to you, nobody gets hurt. But if a robot makes a mistake and hits someone, obviously you don’t want that,” said Francesco Stella, Co-Founder and CEO of Embodied AI. “That’s why we developed robots that are physically safe, useful from day one thanks to teleoperation, and autonomous within a month thanks to our own AI stack.”