The three-person San Francisco office where meetings happen in Chernobyl and Piper Alpha

In a three-person office in San Francisco's South Park neighborhood, every conference room is named for an industrial disaster: Chernobyl, Deepwater, and Piper Alpha. The robot on the workbench is named Roger.

Minerva Humanoids emerged from stealth on October 6 with Roger, a teleoperated humanoid built to keep a specialist out of the line of fire. The specialist runs the dangerous work (explosives, oil and gas, high-voltage power, hazmat) through a VR headset; their hands and judgment stay on the device, and their body stays in the command post.

The team is small. CEO Sandor Felber leads the company. CTO Maurice Rahme spent six years at Boston Dynamics as a technical lead on Stretch, the box-moving robot the company took from prototype to a commercially deployed product. The pair took Roger from idea to a fully functional walking prototype in five months, with bespoke design, manufacturing, and assembly. First units are built in Germany, with a planned second line in the US.

The bet is thesis-stage. Minerva's pre-seed round is roughly $10M. General Catalyst led; Long Journey Ventures and Credo Ventures co-led. The investor list is long for a round this size: MVP Ventures, Kaya, RunwayVC, Compound, Founders Embassy, Hugging Face, Codecademy, YG, Walter Ventures, Tiny Ventures, Chaotica, and Babylon. That says more about the network around the founders than the capital. For context, Figure, Apptronik, 1X, and Physical Intelligence all raised at materially larger scale in 2025 and 2026. Minerva is not at industrial scale.

The bigger distinction is operating model. Most humanoid-robot peers are chasing autonomy. Roger is not. A trained operator wears a VR headset and steers the robot in real time; low-latency control loops make the response feel immediate. A proprietary system called Minerva Intelligence handles balance, fall recovery, and navigation, and translates the operator's input into action. Minerva says operators reach full-body control in minutes. This is a different category from the warehouse and factory humanoids getting the rest of the press this year.

The visible proof points are research, not commercial. Roger has been shown at the NATO Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Centre of Excellence in Samorin, Slovakia, with a keynote and showcase. Minerva has signed research partnerships with the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) for the energy sector, and with the University of Waterloo for perception in smoke, darkness, and other vision-denied environments. The company says it is exploring deployments at two of the world's ten busiest airports; on-site testing focused on public-safety applications is already complete, but no contract has been named. The first paid pilots are slated to begin in the fall.

The labor-safety frame is the founders' own. The company publishes a derived statistic: roughly every 75 minutes, an energy worker somewhere in the world dies on the job, or about 7,000 deaths a year. That figure is Minerva's own estimate. It applies the International Labour Organization's global fatal-work-accident rate (330,000 deaths across a 3.46 billion labor force, ILO 2023) to the IEA's global energy workforce of 76 million (IEA, World Energy Employment 2025). It is a back-of-the-envelope, not a measurement.

Head of Hazardous Operations is Dominic Asquith, a British Special Forces veteran. The target applications are oil and gas (offshore and onshore), EOD, hazmat, and high-voltage power, exactly the categories written on the office's conference-room doors.

The open question is whether teleoperation is a stepping stone to autonomy or a permanent architecture. If autonomous humanoids reach EOD and offshore competence before Minerva's specialist-in-the-loop model scales, the company has built a temporary bridge. If the bridge is durable, Roger is the form factor the labor-safety market has been waiting for. The first paid pilots, in the fall, are the next data point.