Genesis AI thinks the humanoid hype is wrong. Its wheeled robot is the counterargument.

TL;DRGenesis AI unveiled Eno, a wheeled robot with dexterous hands and a foundation model called GENE, positioning it as a cheaper, more practical alternative to humanoids. The French-American startup has raised $105 million in seed funding and plans customer deployments by the end of 2026.

On Tuesday, while the robotics industry continued pouring billions into machines that walk like humans, a startup called Genesis AI unveiled one that deliberately does not. Eno is a wheeled robot with a foldable tower, dexterous hands, and a foundation model its creators say gives it human-level manipulation.

It is a pointed rejection of the industry’s prevailing assumption: that useful robots must look and move like people.

The bet against Genesis is enormous. Figure AI holds a $39 billion private valuation and has begun deploying its Figure 03 humanoid in a Catalyst Brands warehouse, handling logistics for the parent company of JCPenney and Brooks Brothers.

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Hyundai and Boston Dynamics plan to produce 30,000 Atlas humanoids a year by 2028 for deployment at car factories in Georgia. Norway’s 1X Technologies sold out its first production run of 10,000 home robots within five days of opening preorders.

The boom extends to China, where more than 150 companies are chasing a market that delivered roughly 14,000 units in 2025. Yet only 23% of buyers reported satisfaction, a gap between supply-side ambition and demand-side reality that Genesis believes vindicates its approach.

“The hardest problem in robotics is not locomotion,” Zhou Xian, Genesis AI’s co-founder and CEO, told Business Insider. It is manipulation, the ability to handle objects with the dexterity and adaptability of a human hand.

The race to solve that problem has attracted vast investment on its own. Chinese robot-hand maker Linkerbot is targeting a $6 billion valuation on the strength of its dexterous grippers alone, shipping more than 1,000 units a month.

Zhou, who holds a PhD from Carnegie Mellon, founded Genesis with Théophile Gervet, a former Mistral researcher. The company has offices in Paris and San Francisco and employs roughly 60 people.

Eno’s wheeled base is the direct consequence of that diagnosis. Wheels are cheaper to build, simpler to stabilise, and safer to deploy around humans than bipedal legs, which remain an unsolved engineering challenge at commercial scale.

The trade-off is that Eno cannot climb stairs. Genesis argues that for the use cases it is targeting, logistics, ma