Persona AI raises $27M for humanoid shipyard robots

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.

The Company

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 company entered the market with a heavier industrial orientation than the household and warehouse framing common across much of the humanoid category.

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.

The sequence made the financing more specific than a standalone humanoid seed round. Persona announced the HD Hyundai programme first, then raised against a disclosed task domain, partner group and prototype timeline.

Maturity

Persona entered the round as a pre-commercial humanoid company with capital, founder credibility and a strategic shipyard development agreement, but without disclosed deployments, production units, commercial revenue or field performance from its robot.

Its first milestone was a prototype path tied to HD Hyundai’s shipyard-welding programme. Commercial relevance depended on moving from founder-led design and partner-defined requirements into hardware capable of useful field work.

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