Clone Robotics
Component
Polish synthetic-human startup building musculoskeletal androids on water-hydraulic artificial muscles, starting with the Clone Hand.
Clone Robotics builds musculoskeletal androids — robots whose muscles, tendons, bones and vasculature are manufactured rather than assembled from metal links. The core technology is a water-hydraulic artificial muscle: an elastic mesh sleeve over a contracting core, driven by off-the-shelf pumps and valves instead of electric motors, which gives high power density at low cost. Products are Clone Hand, an anthropomorphic hand with roughly 25–37 degrees of freedom that the company priced at about $2,800 and sold as a developer kit, and Clone (Alpha edition), a bipedal android with a synthetic musculoskeletal torso that Clone opened for pre-order. Neoclone is the in-development successor. The company is based in Wrocław, Poland.
Research mapping
Physical AI / Actuation & Motion Control (L8) / Component
Evidence boundary
Original analysis and independent corroboration remain under development. Commercial scale and durable technical advantage remain under review.
What makes it defensible
Water-hydraulic artificial muscles made from moulded mesh and commodity pumps — a route to human-scale power density at consumer price that motor-and-reducer humanoids cannot follow.
Position in the stack: Actuation layer: it replaces electric motors and harmonic reducers with an artificial-muscle system, so the same technology feeds its own androids and could supply limb and hand makers.
Who buys it
Unknown
Named customers: research labs (Clone Hand pre-orders)
Founding team
Dhanush Radhakrishnan — Co-founder & CEO — Co-founded Clone Robotics with Koźlik in November 2021 and runs the company.
Łukasz Koźlik — Co-founder & CTO — Polish engineer and constructor who built the company's first artificial muscle in 2014 and spent seven years developing the synthetic-muscle technology before founding Clone.
SourceFinancing detail
- Last round
- Seed (2023); raising $50M
Investors: Initialized Capital, Lux Capital, Pioneer Fund, Tango VC, Access VC, Trevor Blackwell
Mapped funds and investors
Direct relationships supported by published evidence.
Reported holdings as-of
No sourced relationships mapped yet.
Disclosed investment history
No sourced relationships mapped yet.
Showing up to four relationships in each group. ETF weights describe the fund’s portfolio, not ownership of this company. Private investment history does not establish current ownership.