A scientist who worked on Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot is now building a rival of his own — in Europe, not Silicon Valley.
Rémi Cadène, co-founder and CEO of Paris-based startup UMA, unveiled plans for a lightweight humanoid robot called Northstar and says the company is already talking to 50 potential customers.
From Tesla’s Autopilot group to Hugging Face
Cadène spent roughly three years at Tesla, where he worked inside the Autopilot group on the AI systems behind both the company’s driver-assistance software and Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot. He left in early 2024 to join Hugging Face, the AI platform, where he led the development of LeRobot — an open-source robotics library that has become core infrastructure across the field, growing from zero to more than 12,000 GitHub stars in about a year.
Now he has taken that experience and planted it in European soil. UMA — short for Universal Mechanical Assistant — emerged from stealth in December 2025 with Cadène and three co-founders, including former Hugging Face engineer Simon Alibert and robot designer Rob Knight. The company is backed by venture firms Greycroft, Relentless, and Unity Growth, plus a roster of AI heavyweights investing as angels: Yann LeCun, Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel, and Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf.
The Northstar pitch: Europe first
UMA’s plan is to build a general-purpose, AI-powered humanoid robot for manufacturing plants, logistics warehouses, and eventually homes. Unlike most of its rivals, it is targeting Europe as the beachhead market rather than the US or China.
Cadène’s argument rests on demographics and industry structure. “Labor costs are very high and, given the demographic trends, there will be significant demand,” he said, pointing to the continent’s aging workforce and dense industrial base. UMA is aiming to start industrial pilot programs as early as this year.
It’s a deliberately contrarian bet. The humanoid race has been defined by American players like Tesla and Figure and by Chinese manufacturers such as Unitree that are racing down the cost curve. UMA is wagering that Europe’s manufacturing depth and automation appetite — combined with a talent pool that includes DeepMind, Tesla, Nvidia, and Hugging Face alumni — make it fertile ground for a homegrown champion.
How it stacks up against Optimus
The competitive context matters, because Cadène’s former employer is the loudest voice in this space — and the one with the most to prove.
Tesla is targeting a low-volume production start for its third-generation Optimus at Fremont this summer, and CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly promised the robot will become the company’s most valuable product. But the reality lags the rhetoric. Musk admitted in January that no Optimus robots are doing “useful work” at Tesla in any material way, and Tesla has announced no external customers as it retools a Fremont line for Optimus production.
The company furthest ahead on actual deployment isn’t Tesla at all. Figure’s robots have run shifts at BMW’s Spartanburg plant, where the company says they helped build tens of thousands of vehicles — the clearest example so far of a humanoid doing real, repetitive work at commercial scale. Same thing for the Hyundai/Boston Dynamics partnership.
UMA, by contrast, has no shipping product yet. What it has is a credible team, a pile of investor money, and a claimed pipeline of 50 customers evaluating use cases. In a field where demos routinely outrun deployments, that pipeline — and whether it converts into paid pilots this year — is the number to watch.
Based on the images the company has shared so far, the project appears to be far behind on the robotics front.
However, the biggest bottleneck with humanoid robots appears to be software: having the robots understand and interact intelligently and autonomously with their physical environment.
This appears to be where UMA has the biggest expertise.
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