O-ID raises $1.2 million pre-seed for a modular humanoid with field-swappable parts

O-ID, a Tokyo humanoid robotics startup, announced a $1.2 million pre-seed round on September 24, 2026, led by Chicago-based TAWANI Ventures with Hustle Fund, Techstars and angel investors including the founders of Humanoid Guide. The money is to take its modular humanoid, whose joints, limbs and computers can be swapped on site, toward production.

Why it matters: humanoid economics depend on uptime as much as on purchase price. O-ID is designing its robot around repair first, and it is doing so inside Japan’s automotive supply chain.

What is O-ID’s modular humanoid?

It is a wheeled humanoid for factories, listed at 172 cm tall, 70 kg, with a 16 kg payload and 30 degrees of freedom, according to Humanoids Daily and the Humanoid.guide product database. It rides on a holonomic wheeled base and is split into more than nine modules. Joints, limbs and compute units are designed to be hot-swappable. The maintenance routine described to Humanoids Daily is short: power down, swap the module, load the stored calibration, run readiness checks. O-ID says the process is meant to take minutes.

Onboard sensors monitor component wear so that replacement parts can ship before a module fails, according to Humanoid.guide. O-ID has filed a provisional US patent on its connector technology; it has not been granted. Chief executive Stian Jakobsen described the goal to Humanoids Daily in customer terms: “They don’t need one of our engineers to fly in. That’s how simple we want the experience to be.”

Humanoid.guide lists an indicative price of $70,000 and a four-hour runtime per charge. O-ID’s funding announcement did not state a price, so treat that figure as unconfirmed.

Who founded O-ID and who invested?

O-ID was founded in Tokyo in 2025 by chief executive Stian Jakobsen, a Norwegian with a background in cyber defence, and chief technology officer Simon Gormuzov, a Dutch mechanical engineer with industrial robotics experience. They met at Waseda University. The company joined Techstars Tokyo in 2025. The round was led by TAWANI Ventures; its William Pritzker called modular humanoids “a generational opportunity to expand productivity.” Hustle Fund and Techstars joined, alongside angels including the Humanoid Guide founders, who were early investors in 1X.

$1.2 million is a small cheque by humanoid standards. It pays for a prototype cycle, not a factory. The first prototype, per Tech.eu, was a stationary dual-arm robot for integration testing; the version now in development adds mobility and strength.

When will O-ID robots work in factories?

O-ID plans to unveil its next version at CES 2027 and is targeting factory pilots in early 2027. Both are company plans. Humanoids Daily notes there are no completed deployments, and the Sumitomo Electric letter of intent covers exploratory talks on wire-harness technology for humanoids. It is not a production contract or a customer order. The initial markets are Japanese automotive manufacturing and logistics, with manufacturing planned in Japan and a later push into the US.

The pitch rests on Japan’s labour gap. O-ID’s announcement cites a projected shortage of 11 million workers in Japan by 2040. That demand is also why Japan is building shared humanoid training data, covered in our report on the JHRTI Kanto data factory.

Why does repairability matter for humanoids?

A humanoid that stops for days waiting for a specialist loses most of its value to a factory running shifts. Modular design moves repair from the vendor’s engineers to the customer’s maintenance staff, which is how industrial arms and conveyors are already serviced. Repair and uptime are becoming a business in their own right in Tokyo, as our report on GMO’s humanoid ambulance shows. The open question for O-ID is cost: the company has not yet shown that a modular robot can match the price of an integrated one.