Persona AI raises $27M for humanoid shipyard robots
The Houston startup raised an oversubscribed pre-seed round after signing a shipyard-welding agreement with HD Hyundai, placing its early humanoid work behind a defined heavy-industry use case.
Persona AI raised $27 million in oversubscribed pre-seed funding on May 14, 2025, to develop humanoid robots for shipbuilding and industrial manufacturing. The Houston company announced the round one week after signing an agreement with HD Hyundai, HD Korea Shipbuilding and Offshore Engineering, HD Hyundai Robotics and Vazil Co. covering humanoid welding robots for shipyard automation, placing the company’s first public industrial programme around a named shipbuilding group, a specific trade and a physically demanding worksite.
Persona AI was founded in 2024 by Nic Radford, Jerry Pratt and Jide Akinyode. Radford and Akinyode both worked on NASA’s Valkyrie humanoid robot and later held roles at Nauticus Robotics, while Pratt brought long-running legged-robotics work from IHMC before serving as CTO of Figure.
That founder mix gives Persona a technical lineage across humanoid systems, legged locomotion and field robotics.
The Partnership
The HD Hyundai agreement assigned Persona the development of humanoid hardware and AI-based control and learning algorithms, with HD Korea Shipbuilding and Offshore Engineering, HD Hyundai Robotics and Vazil contributing shipbuilding, robotics integration and welding-domain context. The partners aimed to produce prototypes by the end of 2026, with shipyard deployment expected in 2027, according to Houston Chronicle coverage of the agreement.
Shipyard welding gives the company a specific first task: skilled industrial work in partially built vessels, around confined access points, heavy structures, heat, fumes and human crews. Fixed automation already supports parts of shipbuilding, but vessel construction still includes areas shaped around human reach, tool use and movement through irregular spaces.
The Round
The $27 million round was announced as capital for accelerating development and deployment of Persona’s humanoid platform, which the company described as engineered for demanding tasks in shipbuilding and industrial manufacturing. Persona also described a robotics-as-a-service model, positioning the system as a service-based labor platform if it reaches commercial use.
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