Seoul robotics startup raises $105M for a wheeled humanoid built for factory work

Holiday Robotics closed a $105M Series A for FRIDAY, a wheeled humanoid with hot-swappable batteries, still in early private trials.

Holiday Robotics, based in Seoul, announced a $105 million Series A round in July 2026 to build FRIDAY, a wheeled humanoid robot aimed at industrial work. Rather than a walking design, FRIDAY uses a mobile wheeled base topped with an upper body for manipulation, and it swaps batteries on the fly to keep running.

The company describes FRIDAY as having 64 degrees of freedom, 40 of them in the hands, with lightweight tactile hands, back-drivable arm and hand joints, and 360-degree perception from multiple cameras and lidar. Its control stack is built in-house — including Holiday Sim, Holiday Lab, and a system called OASys — and it uses what the company calls a vision-language-skill approach instead of an end-to-end model. All of these details come from Holiday Robotics itself.

Affordable physical labor is one of the harder problems in the abundance story. A machine that can reliably handle parts in automotive, semiconductor, and logistics settings would lower the cost of making and moving goods, and the same hardware could eventually reach into physical assistance and care. Hot-swappable batteries matter because uptime, not peak capability, is what makes a robot economical.

What to watch is whether the private proofs of concept turn into paid deployments. The company is clear that FRIDAY is in early trials, not commercial use, and its capability claims are unverified by outside parties. Funding buys runway to grow teams in the U.S. and Korea; it does not yet prove the robot works at scale.

Source: The Robot Report