Humanola Raises $2.5 Million Seed Round to Advance Teleoperation and AI Robotics Platform
Humanola, a San Francisco-based robotics technology startup with roots in Uzbekistan, has secured $2.5 million in seed funding as it develops a platform for remote control of humanoid robots and physical AI data infrastructure. The capital raise positions Humanola among a growing wave of robotics and teleoperation startups attracting early venture backing in the United States, and it underscores rising global interest in technologies that enable robots to operate safely and effectively in industrial, medical, logistics and hazardous environments.
Founded by Sanjar Atamuradov, Akbar Erkinov and Zhaoyuan Gu, Humanola is building a hardware-agnostic teleoperation and data platform that allows operators to control robots from anywhere in the world with ultra-low latency and simultaneously collects high-quality physical interaction data for use in training machine learning models. The company’s platform combines real-time telepresence, automated dataset generation and infrastructure for processing and labeling physical robotics data — capabilities that many industry observers view as essential for advancing embodied AI beyond laboratory proof-of-concepts.
The $2.5 million seed round was backed by Link Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on early-stage technology companies; Bad Ideas Fund, an early-stage investment vehicle; Georgia Tech Fund, a venture partnership supporting innovations connected to Georgia Institute of Technology; and entrepreneur Akmal Payziyev, founder of Express24 and Numeo AI. These investors bring a mix of strategic insight, technology sector experience and global networks to Humanola as the company scales its platform and team.
Humanola’s remote robot control technology is designed to address one of the most persistent challenges in robotics: enabling machines to perform complex physical tasks in environments that are dynamic, unpredictable or dangerous for humans. Unlike many autonomous robotics systems that rely on pre-programmed behaviors, Humanola’s platform enables human operators to intervene and guide robots in real time, significantly expanding the practical utility of robots in scenarios such as disaster response, industrial inspection, healthcare assistance and logistics operations.
At the core of Humanola’s strategy is the belief that high-quality physical interaction datasets are critical for the next generation of AI-enabled robots. To that end, the company’s platform automatically collects, cleans, labels and converts teleoperation sessions into structured datasets that can be reused for training machine learning models. This data-centric approach aims to accelerate the development of robust robotic intelligence by circumventing the fragmented and often proprietary data pipelines that have historically slowed progress in the field.
Humanola plans to use the newly raised seed capital to expand its engineering and product teams, enhance the performance and scalability of its teleoperation infrastructure, and broaden its business development efforts with robotics integrators and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) building humanoid and industrial robots. The company has already reported early traction with customers — including teams developing humanoid robots who are using Humanola’s platform to speed up development cycles and improve data quality for learning systems.
The platform’s architecture emphasizes low latency telepresence by combining network optimization techniques with edge compute infrastructure, enabling operator control from great distances with latency often within the sub-100 millisecond range. Early implementations have demonstrated remote operation capabilities such as controlling robots across continents with performance that rivals local control setups, a capability that could unlock a host of new remote work and service scenarios for robotics.
Investors backing Humanola view the company’s data-centric teleoperation stack as a critical enabler for the broader robotics ecosystem, where the shortage of large, high-quality physical datasets has been a constraint on both academic research and commercial development. By offering an independent teleoperation infrastructure that is not tethered to any specific hardware brand, Humanola aims to become a foundational layer for robots across multiple domains, from manufacturing and warehousing to healthcare support and hazardous environment operations.
Humanola’s success in attracting funding also highlights a broader trend of international talent and innovation attracting capital in the U.S. tech ecosystem. As a startup with Uzbek origins scaling in Silicon Valley, Humanola’s seed round reflects both its technical promise and the global nature of cutting-edge robotics entrepreneurship. The company’s leadership has signaled ambition not only to grow its footprint in the U.S. but also to contribute to talent development and technological exchange across regions as physical AI becomes an increasingly strategic field of investment.
The $2.5 million seed financing milestone marks an important step for Humanola as it works to refine its technology, broaden partnerships and position itself at the intersection of robotics, AI and remote work infrastructure — a convergence that many experts believe will shape the next decade of automation and intelligent machines.
