A former Tesla engineer who worked on the Optimus humanoid robot has founded a new humanoid robotics startup in Europe. Remi Cadene, co-founder and chief executive of Paris-based UMA, unveiled plans to develop a next-generation humanoid robot called Northstar. The company is discussing potential adoption with about 50 prospective customers and aims to start an industrial pilot programme this year, targeting manufacturing plants and logistics warehouses in Europe. UMA plans to expand into home-use humanoids over the longer term, prioritizing Europe over the United States or China due to high labour costs, labour shortages and ageing populations. Co-founders include former Hugging Face engineer Simon Alibert and robot designer Rob Knight. Investors include Greycroft, Relentless and Unity Growth, with individual investors including Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel and Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf. Cadene spent about 3 years in Tesla's Autopilot organisation and later led development of the open-source robotics library LeRobot, which secured more than 12,000 GitHub stars. The humanoid market is currently led by U.S. companies such as Tesla and Figure, and Chinese companies including Unitree. Tesla plans to start limited production of the third-generation Optimus this summer, while Figure is being put to work on production-line tasks at BMW's plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina.