Bleu Robotics raises €5 million to scale humanoid robot software

Bleu Robotics was founded in Paris in December 2025 by Benoît Berkoukchi, Jean-Baptiste Mouret and Serena Ivaldi. Berkoukchi spent years managing large teams on automotive assembly lines at Renault, while Mouret and Ivaldi are research directors at INRIA with 15 years as leading academics in AI and robotics. Their stated approach differs from most robotics companies, which Berkoukchi says are trying to train humanoids with millions of data points and build fully general-purpose models. He argues that approach is unsuited to manufacturing because there is not enough data on factory work. The company says its software can be plugged into any humanoid platform, and with each deployment the model benefits from real-world data that makes it more reliable and faster to roll out. Thomas Poitrineau, investor at Contrarian Ventures, said the firm was attracted to Bleu's choice to rethink how humanoid robotics software should work from first principles and called the team rare in combining two world-class robotics researchers with a manufacturing expert. The International Federation of Robotics counted 5 million industrial robots operating globally in 2025, but those machines are built to repeat fixed tasks and cannot adapt to the high-mix, low-volume production now common in modern manufacturing, so that work still falls to human workers.