CtrlK
| Industry | Robotics, Artificial intelligence |
| Founded | 2021 |
| Founders | Dhanush Radhakrishnan (CEO), Lukasz Kozlik (CTO) |
| Headquarters | Wroclaw, Poland; Mountain View, California |
| Employees | ~46 (as of 2026) |
| Key technology | Myofiber artificial muscles, Aquajet valves |
| Products | Clone Hand, Protoclone V1, Clone Alpha |
| Total funding | ~$17 million (raising additional $50M round) |
| Key investors | Initialized Capital, Pioneer Fund, Lux Capital, Tango VC, Access VC, Wikus Ventures |
| Website | clonerobotics.com |
Clone Robotics (also known simply as Clone) is a Polish-American robotics company specializing in biomimetic humanoid robots powered by water-based artificial muscles. Founded in 2021 by Dhanush Radhakrishnan and Lukasz Kozlik, the company is best known for its anatomically accurate approach to robot design, replicating the human body's skeletal, muscular, vascular, and nervous systems rather than relying on conventional electric motors and rigid joints. Clone's flagship product, Clone Alpha, features 206 artificial bones, over 1,000 proprietary Myofiber artificial muscles, and a hydraulic vascular system, making it one of the most anatomically faithful humanoid robots ever developed.
The company gained widespread public attention in February 2025 when a video of its Protoclone V1 prototype went viral on social media, accumulating tens of millions of views and sparking debate about the future of humanoid robotics. Clone Robotics operates from its primary engineering facility in Wroclaw, Poland, with a second office opened in Mountain View, California, as the company scales toward commercial production.
The technological foundations of Clone Robotics trace back to 2014, when Lukasz Kozlik, a student at Wroclaw University of Science and Technology in Poland, began experimenting with McKibben artificial muscles. Originally developed by physicist Joseph McKibben in 1957, these pneumatic actuators consist of an inner rubber tube enclosed in a braided textile sleeve that contracts when pressurized. Kozlik recognized their potential for replicating biological muscle behavior and spent years refining the technology.
To inform his designs, Kozlik visited the dissection room at Wroclaw Medical University, studying cadavers to understand how human muscles, tendons, ligaments, and bones interact mechanically. Rather than engineering robotic joints from scratch, he sought to build mechanical equivalents of biological tissues as they exist in nature. By 2019, Kozlik had developed a functional robotic arm prototype, which he posted on YouTube under the project name Automaton Robotics. The video described the arm as a mechanical copy of a real human arm observed in an anatomy lab and attracted significant online attention.
Kozlik was joined by electronics engineer Amadeusz Swierk and programmer Juliusz Tarnowski, forming the core technical team that would become Clone Robotics. Working from a home-based laboratory in Wroclaw, the team iterated rapidly through arm and hand prototypes, each more anatomically accurate than the last.
In late 2021, Kozlik partnered with Dhanush Radhakrishnan to formally incorporate Clone Robotics (registered as Clone Sp. z o.o. in Poland and Clone, Inc. in the United States). Radhakrishnan assumed the role of CEO, while Kozlik became CTO. Radhakrishnan brought a background in physics and deep learning, along with connections to the American technology and venture capital ecosystem. His thesis was that copying human anatomy one-to-one and pairing it with modern deep learning would yield human-level strength, speed, and dexterity in a soft body at a cost that could scale to mass production.
The company announced its founding publicly in late 2021, with Radhakrishnan posting on LinkedIn that he had started "an android company, Clone." The company quickly attracted early investors, raising an initial $640,000 from angel investors and venture capitalists, including Y Combinator co-founder Trevor Blackwell and the former CTO of Coinbase.
Clone Robotics chose the human hand as its first major product, reasoning that the hand is the most complex manipulator in the human body with the highest concentration of degrees of freedom. If the company could build a functional biomimetic hand, extending the approach to the full body would follow naturally.
By February 2023, the company had unveiled the 18th iteration of the Clone Hand. Key specifications included:
| Specification | Detail |
|---|---|
| Degrees of freedom | 27 |
| Artificial muscles | 37 Myofiber units |
| Skeleton material | Carbon fiber |
| Grip strength | ~15 lbs (6.8 kg) |
| Muscle durability | 650,000 contraction cycles |
| Manufacturing cost | Under $2,800 |
| Actuation | Hydraulic (water-powered) |
The Clone Hand's material cost of under $2,800 stood in sharp contrast to competing robotic hands. Shadow Robot Company's Dexterous Hand, for example, was priced at approximately $116,000. This dramatic cost difference underscored Clone's thesis that biomimetic design using simple artificial muscles could deliver superior dexterity at a fraction of the price of traditional motor-driven systems.
By 2023, 16 advanced artificial intelligence laboratories had placed pre-orders for the Clone Hand. The company also received 116 pre-orders for a planned robotic torso featuring 124 artificial muscles, a movable neck, a rigid spine, and two arms with hands. Customers ranged from research institutions to commercial operations including bakeries and lawn care companies.
In October 2024, Clone Robotics unveiled its first torso prototype, a muscular upper body suspended from a frame that demonstrated dynamic movements driven by water-powered artificial muscles. The prototype featured an artificial spine, chest, shoulders, and arms, with muscles visible through translucent skin layers. The design immediately drew widespread comparisons to the host drones from HBO's science fiction series Westworld, in which androids are assembled from synthetic biological components on mechanical frames.
On February 20, 2025, Clone Robotics released a 40-second video on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) showing the Protoclone V1, the company's first full-body musculoskeletal android prototype. The footage showed the android suspended from the ceiling of a workshop, its limbs twisting, kicking, shrugging, and clenching its fists while its face remained hidden behind a black visor. The movements were visibly organic and fluid, unlike the stiff, mechanical motions typical of motor-driven humanoid robots.
The video went viral rapidly, accumulating over 45 million views and generating intense public reaction. Responses ranged from awe at the engineering achievement to unease at the robot's lifelike movements. "This is my sleep paralysis demon," one commenter wrote. "WestWorld was nonfiction," added another. Dar Sleeper, growth lead at OpenAI-backed 1X Technologies, described the design as both "cooler and creepier" than expected. Media outlets worldwide covered the Protoclone, with publications such as New Atlas, Live Science, Interesting Engineering, and Fox News featuring the story.
In December 2024, Clone Robotics officially announced Clone Alpha, its first humanoid robot designed for eventual consumer use. The company opened pre-orders for a limited production run of exactly 279 units. Industry observers speculated that the number 279 was a reference to HBO's Westworld, though Clone Robotics did not publicly confirm this. A co-founder described the pricing as comparable to a "limited edition supercar," though Radhakrishnan later stated that manufacturing costs could be brought under $20,000 per unit at scale by producing Myofiber muscle fiber "by the kilometer."
Clone Alpha came equipped with the "Telekinesis" training platform, which allows owners to teach the robot new skills through demonstration-based learning. Pre-installed skills include memorizing home layouts and kitchen inventories, shaking hands, pouring drinks, making sandwiches, doing laundry, vacuuming floors, turning lights on and off, setting tables, loading and unloading dishwashers, and engaging in conversational dialogue. The robots are also designed to charge themselves autonomously.
In 2025, Clone Robotics opened a second office in Mountain View, California, marking a significant expansion beyond its Polish roots into the heart of Silicon Valley. The company announced it was raising a $50 million funding round, supplementing approximately $17 million already secured. The expansion reflected the company's ambition to compete directly with well-funded American humanoid robotics firms.
In October 2024, the company made a significant talent acquisition when Viktor Makoviichuk, co-founder of NVIDIA's Isaac Gym (a GPU-accelerated simulation platform for robot training), joined Clone as Chief Scientist to lead the development of "embodiment intelligence."
Dhanush Radhakrishnan is the co-founder and CEO of Clone Robotics. During high school, Radhakrishnan designed, constructed, and optimized a magnetoplasmadynamic (MPD) thruster, a project that earned him Special Awards from the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and National Space Society in 2012. He was a four-time finalist at the ExxonMobil Texas Science and Engineering Fair (EMTSEF) between 2010 and 2013.
Radhakrishnan attended New York University, where he published nuclear fusion theory research and worked in the Department of Mathematics at the Institute of Mathematical Science. He interned at Roivant Sciences as a computational researcher and worked as a researcher in the theory department at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), focusing on magnetic fusion and magnetohydrodynamics.
Radhakrishnan has cited watching Iron Man at age 13 as the spark for his lifelong interest in technology, leading him from plasma physics research to founding Clone Robotics. His core thesis for the company is that an anatomically accurate android will match human range of motion, strength, and joint speed if its artificial muscles can match human skeletal muscle in displacement, force, and speed.
Lukasz Kozlik (Polish: Lukasz Kozlik) is the co-founder and CTO of Clone Robotics. Based in Wroclaw, Poland, Kozlik studied at Wroclaw University of Science and Technology and has spent over a decade developing biomimetic robotic systems. His work began around 2014 with efforts to improve McKibben artificial muscles, and he visited the dissection room at Wroclaw Medical University to study human anatomy firsthand.
Kozlik's 2019 YouTube video of a robotic arm prototype, posted under the Automaton Robotics project name, was one of the earliest public demonstrations of the technology that would become Clone Robotics. In interviews with Polish technology media, Kozlik has articulated Clone's long-term vision of creating robots indistinguishable from living humans, "down to the deepest layers of anatomy."
Clone Robotics takes a fundamentally different approach from most humanoid robot companies. While competitors such as Tesla (Optimus), Figure AI (Figure 02), and Boston Dynamics (Atlas) use electric motors, gear reducers, and rigid joints, Clone replicates the biological architecture of the human body. The company's robots feature a polymer skeleton with articulated joints, artificial ligaments and connective tissues, water-powered muscles attached at anatomically correct insertion points, and a hydraulic vascular system. This approach is rooted in the study of human anatomy rather than traditional mechanical engineering.
The advantage of biomimetic design, according to Clone, is that it produces inherently soft, compliant robots that move with natural fluidity rather than the rigid, jerky movements typical of motor-driven humanoids. Because the robots use water rather than heavy electric motors, they are also lightweight enough to avoid damaging household floors.
Clone's proprietary Myofiber artificial muscles are the company's core technology. Based on an updated version of the McKibben muscle design, each Myofiber consists of an inner rubber tube wrapped in an inextensible textile sleeve. When the tube is filled with hydraulic fluid (water in production models; air is used during prototyping), it expands radially and contracts longitudinally, pulling on attached tendons and bones in a manner analogous to biological muscle contraction.
Clone introduced a critical innovation over earlier McKibben designs by switching from pneumatic (air-based) to hydraulic (water-based) actuation. Water is incompressible, which provides more precise control and higher force density than air. It also simplifies the system, as leaks result only in water rather than hazardous hydraulic fluid.
| Myofiber Specification | Value |
|---|---|
| Weight per fiber | 3 grams |
| Contraction force | At least 1 kg per fiber |
| Unloaded contraction | Greater than 30% |
| Response time | Under 50 milliseconds |
| Contraction speed | 30% faster than human muscle tissue |
| Actuation medium | Water (hydraulic) |
| Configuration | Monolithic musculotendon units (eliminating tendon failures) |
Clone claims Myofiber is "the only artificial muscle in the world capable of achieving such a combination of weight, power density, speed, force-to-weight, and energy efficiency." The company produces muscle fiber "by the kilometer," which is central to its cost-reduction strategy.
To control the flow of water to over 1,000 individual Myofiber muscles, Clone developed the Aquajet, a proprietary miniaturized hydraulic valve. Traditional hydraulic valves are too large and power-hungry for use in a humanoid robot; Clone's early prototypes struggled with valves that were "just too big" before the team managed to reduce them to one-eighth of their original size.
| Aquajet Specification | Value |
|---|---|
| Operating pressure | 100 psi |
| Flow rate | 2.28 SLPM |
| Power consumption | Under 1 watt |
| Configuration | Three-way |
| Size | 12 mm (miniaturized) |
The Aquajet's low power consumption (under 1 watt per valve) is critical for enabling a humanoid robot with over 1,000 muscles to operate on a practical energy budget.
The robot's vascular system is powered by a compact hydraulic pump located in the torso, which the company refers to as the robot's "hydraulic heart." This pump circulates water through the Aquajet vascular network to all Myofiber muscles throughout the body.
| Pump Specification | Value |
|---|---|
| Power | 500 watts |
| Flow rate | 40 SLPM |
| Operating pressure | 100 psi |
| Fluid medium | Water |
The use of water rather than traditional hydraulic oil addresses a longstanding concern about hydraulic robots in household environments: the risk of oil leaks contaminating living spaces. If a Clone robot's hydraulic system leaks, only water is released. When the system needs topping up, the robot can be refilled, similar to "drinking."
Clone's robots feature a polymer skeleton that replicates all 206 bones of the human body. The skeleton includes articulated joints, artificial ligaments, and connective tissues designed to mimic the mechanical properties of their biological counterparts. The upper torso of Clone Alpha features 164 degrees of freedom, including 26 degrees of freedom in each hand-wrist-elbow combination. This is among the highest reported for any humanoid robot.
Clone's Protoclone V1 prototype includes approximately 500 sensors distributed throughout the body:
| Sensor Type | Count | Function |
|---|---|---|
| Pressure sensors | 320 | Force feedback and grip control |
| Inertial measurement units (IMUs) | 70 | Joint position and orientation tracking |
| Depth cameras | 4 | Visual perception and spatial awareness |
| Additional sensors | ~106 | Muscle length, force, and other proprioceptive data |
Clone's robots employ a water-based cooling system that circulates approximately 2 liters of fluid through microchannels, dissipating heat generated by the Myofiber muscles during operation. The system is bio-inspired, functioning analogously to perspiration in humans. Clone Robotics has described the Protoclone V1 as "the first robot that literally perspires under strain," with excess heat causing visible moisture on the robot's surface.
Clone Alpha's onboard intelligence runs on an NVIDIA Jetson Thor GPU, which delivers 2,070 FP4 TFLOPS of compute performance. The company has developed Cybernet, a proprietary visuomotor foundation model that processes sensor data and drives motor commands. Clone's AI approach combines:
With the hiring of Viktor Makoviichuk (co-founder of NVIDIA's Isaac Gym) as Chief Scientist in October 2024, Clone signaled its commitment to leveraging state-of-the-art reinforcement learning and simulation technology for robot training.
The Clone Hand was the company's first commercial product, an anthropomorphic robotic hand with 27 degrees of freedom and 37 Myofiber muscles. Built with a carbon fiber skeleton and hydraulic actuation, it was designed for use in research laboratories, prosthetics, and industrial manipulation tasks. The hand achieved a grip strength of approximately 15 pounds at a material cost under $2,800. Sixteen AI labs pre-ordered the Clone Hand, and the company planned to make version 20 commercially available starting in 2023.
The Protoclone V1 is Clone's first full-body musculoskeletal android prototype, unveiled in February 2025. It is not a commercial product but a development platform demonstrating the integration of all Clone subsystems into a single humanoid form.
| Protoclone V1 Specification | Value |
|---|---|
| Height | 180 cm (5 ft 11 in) |
| Width | 60 cm |
| Depth | 40 cm |
| Walking speed | 3 km/h (target) |
| Artificial bones | 206 |
| Myofiber muscles | 1,000+ |
| Degrees of freedom | 200+ |
| Sensors | ~500 |
| Hydraulic pump | 500 W, 40 SLPM, 100 psi |
| Cooling | Water-based microchannel (2 L circulating) |
As of early 2026, Protoclone V1 has been shown only in suspended-frame demonstrations. The robot has not yet been publicly demonstrated walking independently or performing household tasks autonomously.
Clone Alpha is Clone's first product designed for consumer use. Standing 170 cm tall and weighing approximately 60 kg, it shares the core Myofiber technology and 206-bone skeleton of the Protoclone but is designed as a more refined, production-ready unit. Clone is manufacturing a limited run of 279 units, with pre-orders accepted starting in 2025. The robot includes the Telekinesis training platform and pre-installed skills for household tasks.
For detailed specifications and analysis, see the main article: Clone Alpha.
Clone Robotics has raised approximately $17 million in total funding through multiple rounds. Early funding included $640,000 from angel investors and venture capitalists, including Trevor Blackwell (co-founder of Y Combinator) and the former CTO of Coinbase. The company also conducted equity crowdfunding through the Republic platform using a Crowd SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) structure, with a valuation cap of approximately $30 million.
Institutional investors include:
| Investor | Type |
|---|---|
| Initialized Capital | Venture capital |
| Pioneer Fund | Venture capital (Y Combinator-affiliated) |
| Lux Capital | Venture capital |
| Tango VC | Seed-stage robotics VC |
| Access VC | Venture capital |
| Wikus Ventures | Venture capital |
As of 2026, Clone Robotics is raising an additional $50 million round to fund its Silicon Valley expansion and push toward commercial production.
CEO Dhanush Radhakrishnan has outlined a phased deployment strategy for Clone's robots:
| Timeline | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Late 2026 | "Surgically accurate" torso platform capable of using complex tools (scalpels, power drills) |
| 2027 | Demonstration of natural, human-like bipedal walking |
| 2028 | Launch of commercial "Robo Butler" products targeting enterprise environments (hotels, assisted living) |
| Future | Consumer home deployment |
Radhakrishnan has stated that Clone will first be deployed in industrial facilities, followed by hotels and assisted living facilities, before eventually reaching private homes. The company positions its unique technology as enabling robots that are "highly competitive in price and performance" compared to motor-driven alternatives.
Clone Robotics has outlined a progression of increasingly human-like android generations:
This progression reflects the company's stated goal of eventually creating "synthetic humans" rather than conventional humanoid robots.
Clone Robotics operates in the rapidly growing humanoid robot market alongside well-funded competitors pursuing different technical approaches.
| Company | Robot | Approach | Key Differentiator |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clone Robotics | Clone Alpha | Biomimetic, water-powered muscles | Anatomical accuracy, soft body, low material cost |
| Tesla | Optimus Gen 3 | Electric motors, tendon-driven hands | Manufacturing scale, $20,000 price target, 25 actuators per hand |
| Figure AI | Figure 02 | Electric actuators, OpenAI integration | Real-world factory deployment at BMW |
| 1X Technologies | NEO | Electric motors, soft body design | OpenAI-backed, safety-focused |
| Boston Dynamics | Atlas (electric) | Electric hydraulic hybrid | Advanced locomotion, decades of research |
| Unitree | H1 / G1 | Electric motors | Low cost, rapid iteration |
| Agility Robotics | Digit | Electric actuators | Warehouse logistics focus |
Radhakrishnan has argued that competitors relying on gears and electric motors face "entirely different technical roadmaps" from Clone, and that Clone's hydraulic-muscle approach provides distinct advantages in softness, speed, and dexterity. However, critics note that Clone has not yet publicly demonstrated a fully integrated, autonomously walking robot, while competitors like Tesla and Figure AI have already deployed prototypes in real-world work environments.
Despite the attention generated by its viral videos and ambitious vision, Clone Robotics faces several notable challenges: