Persona AI

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A Houston humanoid-robot company targeting heavy industry, especially shipyard welding.

Persona AI was founded in Houston, Texas, in 2024. Its leadership includes CEO Nic Radford, CTO Jerry Pratt — a bipedal-robot researcher — and co-founder and COO Jide Akinyode. The company builds humanoid robots for heavy industry, with shipyard welding as its main focus alongside listed use cases such as mining, inspection, and steel-structure fabrication; commercially it plans to run on a robots-as-a-service model, charging by usage so customers don't need to buy the hardware outright. In May 2025 it announced an oversubscribed pre-seed round of $27 million. It has signed an agreement with South Korea's HD Hyundai group to develop humanoid welding robots for shipbuilding, with prototype delivery planned for late 2026 and on-site testing and commercial deployment starting in 2027.

ExampleDeveloping a bipedal humanoid robot that can walk into a ship's hull structure and weld.

Related: Humanoid Robot · HD Hyundai · Robot-as-a-Service · Dirty, Dull, and Dangerous (3D) Jobs · Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition
Sources: Persona AI Raises $27M Oversubscribed Pre-Seed
HD Hyundai and Persona AI Sign Agreement to Deploy Humanoid Welding Robots
Persona AI 官网 (Chinese)
As of: 2026-09