Wandercraft
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Wandercraft is a French robotics company, headquartered in Paris, that designs and builds self-balancing walking exoskeletons and, more recently, an industrial humanoid robot. Founded in 2012, it is best known for Atalante, the first commercially available self-balancing medical exoskeleton, which lets people with paralysis or impaired mobility stand and walk hands-free during rehabilitation without crutches or a support frame. In 2025 the company extended the same balance-control technology into a headless industrial humanoid called Calvin-40, built in roughly 40 days, and announced a partnership with the carmaker Renault Group, which became both an investor and Wandercraft's first commercial customer for the robot. The company has raised on the order of $140 million to $150 million in equity and debt across its history.
Wandercraft (the robotics firm) should not be confused with several unrelated consumer "WanderCraft" travel-planning brands that share the name; this article concerns only the Paris-based exoskeleton and humanoid-robot maker at wandercraft.eu.
Wandercraft was founded in 2012 by a group of engineers from the École Polytechnique in Paris. Co-founder Nicolas Simon had chaired the school's robotics club, where he began working on one of the hardest problems in the field: getting a bipedal robot to walk like a human in a self-stabilized way, without falling over. He brought in two fellow Polytechnique roboticists, Matthieu Masselin and Alexandre Boulanger, along with Jean-Louis Constanza, an engineer and business executive. Masselin became chief executive and Simon led the core walking technology.
Two personal stories are commonly cited as the company's motivation. Simon's brother has Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a genetic neuromuscular disorder, and gradually lost the ability to run, ski and ultimately to stand and walk unaided. Separately, Constanza has recounted that his son, who uses a wheelchair, asked him, "You're a robotics engineer, so why don't you make a robot that can help me walk?" The founders framed the company's mission as refusing to accept the wheelchair as the only option for people who cannot walk.
| Co-founder | Background | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Matthieu Masselin | École Polytechnique, roboticist | Chief executive officer |
| Nicolas Simon | École Polytechnique, led the school robotics club | Co-founder, walking technology |
| Alexandre Boulanger | École Polytechnique, roboticist | Co-founder |
| Jean-Louis Constanza | Engineer and business executive | Co-founder |
Wandercraft demonstrated early clinical results in 2017, showing that people with paraplegia could walk hands-free in its exoskeleton without crutches. Its first commercial device, Atalante, received the European CE mark in 2019 and entered rehabilitation and neurology hospitals. The company then broadened the medical indications and, in 2022, launched an updated model called Atalante X. By the mid-2020s the company reported more than 100 of its devices operating in the field and, by its own account, well over a million combined steps and actions logged across deployments, data the firm uses to validate and improve its balance algorithms.
Wandercraft has been funded through a mix of venture equity, public deep-tech money (notably France's Bpifrance) and debt. Reported totals vary by source and by whether debt financing is counted, but cluster around $140 million to $150 million cumulatively.
| Round | Date | Amount | Notable investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Series A | November 2015 | about $4.4M | early backers |
| Series B | September 2017 | undisclosed | Bpifrance (first investment) |
| Series C | January 2022 | $45M | Quadrant Management (lead), Bpifrance, SofiOuest, XAnge, Eurazeo, LBO France, Cemag Invest, and insurers MACSF, Malakoff Humanis, AG2R La Mondiale, Mutuelles Impact |
| Debt facility | April 2024 | about EUR 25M | European Investment Bank |
| Series D | June 2025 | $75M (equity and debt) | Renault Group, PSIM fund (Bpifrance, France 2030), Teampact Ventures, Quadrant Management, plus LBO France, Mutuelles Impact (XAnge), Cemag Invest, Martagon Capital, AG2R La Mondiale |
The January 2022 Series C of $45 million was led by the New York fund Quadrant Management, whose chairman Alan Quasha joined Wandercraft's board. At that time the company said the cash would fund a lighter exoskeleton for home and outdoor use and accelerate its United States expansion.
The $75 million Series D was announced on June 11, 2025. Wandercraft described it as a combination of equity and debt, with Sifted reporting that it was majority equity. Renault Group and the Bpifrance-managed PSIM fund (part of the French government's France 2030 program) were the lead participants, alongside Teampact Ventures and Quadrant Management. The company said the proceeds would bring its personal exoskeleton, Eve, to market as early as 2026, expand clinical adoption of Atalante X, and develop and deploy the Calvin-40 humanoid. As part of the round, Renault took a minority stake. Some outlets, counting all prior rounds and debt, have described the company's lifetime financing as roughly $137 million to nearly $150 million.
Atalante is a self-balancing, hands-free walking exoskeleton intended for use in clinics and rehabilitation centers. Unlike most rehabilitation exoskeletons, which require the user to support themselves on crutches, a walker or parallel bars, Atalante balances itself dynamically so the patient's hands remain free. The device uses roughly a dozen motorized joints across the hips, knees and ankles and is steered through the user's upper-body movements (or, for some patients, head-mounted sensors). Wandercraft markets a "dynamic balance" mode it says is unavailable in competing products.
Atalante received CE marking in 2019 and has been used across European rehabilitation and neurology hospitals to treat patients with conditions including spinal cord injury, stroke, hemiplegia and brain injury. In the United States, the device (sold as Atalante X) has obtained multiple U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearances:
Sifted reported an Atalante X price around EUR 200,000 (about $228,000) and roughly 110 units sold, used in hospitals and rehabilitation centers; earlier coverage from 2022 noted around 14 European hospitals owned the device at that point and quoted a per-unit price of roughly EUR 150,000 to EUR 200,000.
Eve is Wandercraft's planned personal, self-balancing exoskeleton for everyday use, both indoors and outdoors, by people with mobility impairments. The company describes it as a lighter, lower-cost successor to the hospital-grade Atalante and has targeted bringing it to market around 2026. Sifted cited an indicative price near $92,000. A paraplegic tennis player, Kevin Piette, wore a Wandercraft exoskeleton during a demonstration tied to the 2024 Paris Olympics.
In 2025 Wandercraft began clinical trials of the personal exoskeleton in New York and New Jersey, recruiting additional participants with the stated goal of completing the trials and then applying for FDA clearance immediately afterward.
Calvin-40 is Wandercraft's industrial humanoid robot, unveiled in June 2025. Its name comes from its development time: the company says it built the robot in about 40 days, drawing on more than a decade of work on self-balancing bipedal locomotion from its exoskeleton program. The "40" also matches its rated payload of up to 40 kilograms (about 90 pounds), which the company says it can lift and carry several hundred times a day without rest.
A distinctive feature is that Calvin-40 is headless: rather than a head-mounted sensor cluster, its cameras and sensors are positioned lower on the body. Wandercraft says this gives the robot a clearer view of tools, parts and work surfaces and lets it fit under equipment and between shelving more easily. The robot uses feet with force sensors for center-of-mass estimation and reactive balance (the same lineage of balance control developed for the exoskeletons), day/night cameras for manipulation, navigation and obstacle avoidance, and what the company calls "medical-grade" software with layered visual and auditory safety features. Wandercraft describes Calvin-40 as able to work autonomously, using its vision system and large-language-model-based reasoning, and as modular and "use-case driven" by design. Detailed figures such as height, total degrees of freedom and actuator count have not been published, though the company describes the robot as human-scale and says its lower-limb platform had already been validated over more than a million steps.
Wandercraft positions Calvin-40 as taking on the most physically demanding, non-ergonomic jobs, starting in manufacturing and logistics, and has described it as the first industrial humanoid robot developed by a European company.
Alongside the June 2025 Series D, Renault Group became a Wandercraft investor and the first commercial partner and customer for Calvin-40. The agreement pairs Wandercraft's robotics with Renault's manufacturing scale and design-to-cost expertise, which both companies framed as a way to drive down the unit cost of the humanoid (and, in turn, of the Eve exoskeleton and the broader Calvin family).
Calvin-40 was put to work on a Renault production line handling tires, one of the more ergonomically punishing workstations, feeding the assembly line. The robot has been tested at Renault sites in France, including the Refactory at Flins and the Douai plant, where Renault has said it was operational.
On March 10, 2026, during the launch of its "futuREady" strategic plan, Renault announced it would deploy 350 Calvin humanoid robots across its manufacturing facilities within roughly 18 months, part of a wider drive to cut production costs. Renault's Chief Industry, Quality and Supply Chain Officer, Thierry Charvet, said Calvin was already operational on the tire-handling line and highlighted its ability to move heavy loads while balancing and navigating autonomously. Constanza framed the move as France and the European Union taking up the humanoid-robot challenge at industrial scale.
Wandercraft also announced a deployment partnership with SAPA, an Italy-based Tier 1 automotive supplier, to implement and scale Calvin-40 across SAPA's industrial operations in two countries, with an initial focus on the high-precision, repetitive movement of large and heavy parts.
Wandercraft's core technical asset is real-time dynamic balance control for bipedal machines, combining motorized joints, force sensing in the feet, gait planning and control algorithms that keep the system upright while it moves or carries loads. The same control stack underlies both the medical exoskeletons and Calvin-40, which is why the company could stand up an industrial humanoid quickly.
In 2025 Wandercraft disclosed a collaboration with NVIDIA to apply "physical AI" to its personal exoskeleton. Wandercraft said it uses NVIDIA Isaac Sim, built on the Omniverse platform, to simulate and train its robotics in virtual environments; NVIDIA Isaac for Healthcare as a development framework; and the Jetson Thor on-robot edge computer (based on NVIDIA's Blackwell architecture) for onboard compute. The stated aim is software that continuously adapts to a user's movements in real time for smooth, stable walking across different surfaces. This places Wandercraft within the broader wave of embodied AI and robot foundation model work, in which large models and high-fidelity simulation are used to give robots general physical skills.
Wandercraft is frequently cited as a notable European entrant in both medical robotics and the fast-growing humanoid sector, where it competes for attention with United States makers such as Figure AI, Tesla (with Optimus) and others, as well as a wave of Chinese humanoid firms. Commentators have contrasted Calvin-40's deliberately narrow, "headless" industrial design and rapid build with more general-purpose humanoids, and several outlets framed the Renault deployment as a sign that European industry was moving to put humanoids on real production lines rather than only in demos. The company reports that its installed fleet was completing on the order of a million actions per month by 2025.