Clone Robotics reveals Protoclone, a musculoskeletal humanoid powered by artificial muscles

In January 2025, Clone Robotics posted a 40-second video of Protoclone, its suspended humanoid robot making dynamic movements in a workshop. The clip reached millions of views within hours. The reaction divided immediately between fascination and unease; the head of growth at 1X Technologies called it the coolest and creepiest robot design he had seen. The video was not a product launch or a funding announcement. It was an engineering demonstration from a small Polish-American company that has spent the better part of a decade building something no other humanoid company is attempting.

The company

Clone Robotics was founded in 2021 by Dhanush Radhakrishnan, CEO, and Lucas Kozlik, CTO, and is headquartered in New York City. Radhakrishnan previously co-founded SymplexHealth and Symplex. Total disclosed funding is $7.1 million from Access VC, Initialized Capital, Pioneer Fund, Wikus Ventures, and Tango VC. The company has approximately 50 employees. The co-founder of NVIDIA Isaac Gym, NVIDIA's physics simulation platform for robot training, has joined the team.

The technology

Every major humanoid robot on the market uses electric motors. Clone Robotics uses artificial muscles. Protoclone is driven by over 1,000 hydraulic myofibers, 206 3D-printed bones, and more than 200 sensors monitoring pressure, balance, and motion in real time. The robot has over 200 degrees of freedom. The system runs on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin chip coordinating thousands of simultaneous muscle contractions. Clone describes the design as including synthetic organ systems spanning skeletal, muscular, vascular, and nervous functions. The current prototype runs on pneumatics; the company plans to transition to hydraulics as development continues.

The claim that muscle-based actuation is meaningfully different from motor-based actuation is not marketing. Electric motors in most humanoids use gearboxes to achieve the torque needed for manipulation and locomotion; those gearboxes add weight, introduce compliance limits, and produce the characteristic stiff, mechanical motion that distinguishes current humanoids from human movement. Biological muscle contracts directly, distributes force across a limb, and is inherently compliant. A robot built on the same principle would, in theory, move differently from every motor-driven system on the market.

If it works

Clone is the only company building humanoids with synthetic muscles. If the approach succeeds, the implications extend beyond having a more human-like robot; the underlying architecture would make the motor-driven designs from Tesla, Figure, Unitree, and most others look like an intermediate technology rather than a mature one. That is a high-risk claim to stake a company on. It is also the reason Clone has attracted genuine attention despite raising a fraction of the capital its peers have secured.

Where it actually is

After eight years of development, Protoclone is still mastering balance and walking. Training is happening first in physics simulations before real-world attempts. Clone has planned a limited release of 279 Clone Alpha androids at approximately $20,000 each. No shipping date for Clone Alpha has been confirmed, no named customers have been disclosed, and no autonomous task performance has been publicly demonstrated outside the viral suspension videos. The $7.1 million in total funding is roughly what larger humanoid competitors raise in a single seed tranche.

Clone is a research bet on a different architecture. The viral moments are real; the commercial product is not yet. Whether synthetic muscle actuation can be made reliable, manufacturable, and commercially viable at any price point is the question eight years of development has not yet answered publicly.

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