Clone Robotics — muscle-driven biomimetic androids from Wrocław
Clone Robotics is a Polish-American robotics company building biomimetic humanoid androids powered by proprietary Myofiber artificial muscles and a water-based hydraulic vascular system rather than conventional electric motors and rigid actuators. With Clone Alpha — a limited-run musculoskeletal android built around 206 polymer bones and more than 1,000 artificial muscle fibers — Clone occupies a distinctive niche in the current humanoid robotics and AI boom, alongside general-purpose competitors such as Sanctuary AI, 1X, Tesla Optimus, Figure AI, and Apptronik.
- 2021Founded
- Wrocław, PLHeadquarters
- Clone AlphaLatest flagship
- ~$17MFunding raised
- Poland / USACountry
- PrivateStatus
About Clone Robotics
Clone Robotics — legally registered as Clone Sp. z o.o. in Poland and Clone, Inc. in the United States — was founded in late 2021 by Dhanush Radhakrishnan and Polish engineer Łukasz Koźlik, whose earlier artificial-muscle work had already circulated widely online under the name Automaton Robotics. Radhakrishnan took the role of CEO and handles US operations and fundraising; Koźlik serves as CTO and leads the technical program from the company's Wrocław headquarters. Polish coverage additionally credits Wrocław University of Science and Technology graduates Amadeusz Świerk and Juliusz Tarnowski as members of the founding engineering group.
The company's core thesis is unusual for the current humanoid robotics wave: rather than pursue a general-purpose robot built from rigid electric actuators, high-torque BLDC servos, and gear reducers, Clone is attempting to replicate the human body itself — its skeletal frame, its muscular actuators, its vascular fluid loop, and its nervous system — using synthetic analogs. The result is a fundamentally biomimetic platform: 206 polymer bones, articulated joints with ligaments and connective tissue, more than 1,000 proprietary Myofiber muscles anchored to anatomically correct bone attachment points, 500-plus sensors, and a water-based hydraulic loop that plays the role of the circulatory system.
Clone's public trajectory has been driven largely by viral video demonstrations rather than customer announcements. The Clone Hand and Clone Torso demonstrations established the Myofiber system's credibility, and in December 2024 the company unveiled the full Clone Alpha android and opened preorders for a limited run of 279 units. In February 2025, Clone released widely circulated footage of its Protoclone V1 android suspended from a rigging harness, twitching and kicking as its water-powered muscles fired — a sequence that dominated technology and mainstream news cycles for weeks and cemented the company's public profile.
On the funding side, Clone raised approximately $640,000 in early angel capital from investors including Y Combinator co-founder Trevor Blackwell, followed by a roughly $7 million seed in early 2023 with participation from Pioneer Fund, Lux Capital, Tango.vc, Initialized Capital, and Access VC. Company statements in 2026 have referenced roughly $17 million in total funding to date and an active $50 million round; that larger round has not yet been reported as closed in public funding databases. Clone competes in the broader humanoid robotics category with Sanctuary AI, 1X, Figure AI, Tesla Optimus, Apptronik, and Agility Robotics, though its actuation approach — soft, muscle-driven, hydraulic — sets it apart from every other well-funded entrant in the space.
Product lineup: Clone Hand, Clone Torso, Protoclone, and Clone Alpha
Clone Robotics has iterated in public on a subsystem-by-subsystem basis: first a Myofiber-driven hand, then a torso, then a full skeletal android, and finally the limited-run consumer android Clone Alpha. Each release has been paired with high-production video content and, in most cases, has gone viral.
Clone Hand (2022–2023) — the Myofiber proof point
The Clone Hand was the first widely shared demonstration of the Myofiber muscle concept: a soft-actuated robotic hand capable of realistic finger articulation, driven by hydraulic fluid rather than servos or tendon-cable motors. It served as the technical demo that established the underlying muscle technology and helped anchor early angel investment.
Clone Torso (2023–2024) — scaling up the muscle bank
The Clone Torso extended the Myofiber approach to a full upper-body skeleton with dozens of muscles anchored to a polymer rib cage, shoulders, and arms. It proved the technology could scale from a single hand to a coordinated, multi-joint musculoskeletal system.
Protoclone V1 (2025) — the full bipedal android
Protoclone V1 is Clone's first full-body, bipedal musculoskeletal android — a 206-bone polymer skeleton with more than 1,000 Myofibers, over 500 sensors, and over 200 degrees of freedom. Publicly unveiled in February 2025 while suspended from an overhead rig, it was shown twitching, kicking, and articulating in a way widely described as eerily lifelike.
Clone Alpha (2024 preorder → 2025+ delivery) — the limited-run flagship
Clone Alpha is the productized version of the platform: a domestic musculoskeletal android designed for the home, sold in a limited edition of 279 units and paired with the company's Telekinesis training platform used to teach the android new skills. Preorders opened in December 2024. Clone Alpha inherits the full Protoclone architecture — the polymer skeleton, the Myofiber muscle bank, the hydraulic vascular system driven by a 500 W electric pump, and the sensor mesh — and packages it as a finished consumer product.
| Model | Year | Height | Weight | Payload | Battery/Runtime | Actuators | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clone Hand | 2022 | — | — | — | Tethered | Myofiber (hydraulic) | First public Myofiber demo |
| Clone Torso | 2023 | — | — | — | Tethered | Myofiber (hydraulic) | Multi-muscle upper-body demo |
| Protoclone V1 | 2025 | ~1.70 m | ~60 kg | — | Tethered pump | 1,000+ Myofibers | Full bipedal skeleton; 200+ DOF |
| Clone Alpha | 2024– | ~1.70 m | ~60 kg | Household tasks | 500 W hydraulic pump | 1,000+ Myofibers | Limited to 279 units; Telekinesis training |
Technology stack
Clone's platform is architecturally unlike every other well-funded humanoid robot. Instead of BLDC motors, harmonic drives, and rigid link geometry, the entire actuation stack is built from soft, water-powered muscle fibers attached to a polymer skeleton — an approach much closer to biology than to mechatronics. The company has publicly framed this as a bet that the fastest path to a truly dexterous, human-like android is to copy the human body directly.
Perception and sensing
The Protoclone and Clone Alpha platforms carry more than 500 sensors distributed across the body, including proprioceptive sensors on the muscle fibers and joints, pressure and flow sensors on the hydraulic system, and a machine-vision stack for external perception. The dense sensor layer is what allows the control system to model the robot's own musculoskeletal state — a much harder observation problem than a traditional rigid robot with a handful of joint encoders.
Myofiber artificial muscles and the vascular loop
Myofiber, pioneered by Clone in 2021, is the company's proprietary artificial-muscle technology. Each Myofiber is a monolithic musculotendon unit built from a mesh sleeve wrapped around a bladder — an evolution of the classic McKibbin pneumatic muscle. When hydraulic fluid pressurizes the bladder, it expands radially and forces the mesh to contract longitudinally, pulling on the bone attachment point. Clone publishes performance figures of under 50 ms response time, over 30 percent unloaded contraction, and roughly 1 kg of contraction force per 3-gram fiber. A 500-watt electric pump plays the role of the heart, circulating hydraulic fluid at approximately 40 SLPM through a network of 3D-printed flexible hoses to the more than 1,000 individual muscles across the body.
Control model, power, and compute
Coordinating a 200+ DOF musculoskeletal system with soft actuators is fundamentally a learning-heavy problem — traditional inverse-kinematics approaches used on rigid robots do not translate cleanly. Clone uses a whole-body control stack and a Telekinesis training platform that lets a human teleoperator demonstrate tasks and generate training data for the on-robot policy. Power management is uniquely demanding: the platform must drive not just motor controllers but a bank of proportional hydraulic valves, pump drivers, and pressure sensors, all coordinated in real time with onboard compute and the sensor mesh.
The electronic-components stack behind a muscle-driven humanoid is dense and unforgiving. Wide-bandgap semiconductors (SiC and GaN) drive the high-current pump inverter and the proportional-valve solenoids without the thermal overhead of legacy silicon. Every gate-drive and current-sense channel depends on tightly matched precision passives — thin-film resistors, low-drift references, and thousands of MLCC capacitors distributed across the power and signal rails. Battery-management ICs — cell balancers, protection front ends, gas-gauge fuel gauges, and multi-stage protection controllers — sit at the practical ceiling on how long a hydraulic humanoid can operate untethered, since every extra minute of runtime translates directly into more pump work and more muscle cycles the pack has to deliver.
Applications and target markets
Clone Robotics is pursuing a different customer profile from most of the current humanoid wave. Instead of chasing industrial pilots on automotive assembly lines or logistics distribution centers, the company is targeting the home and research markets first, with Clone Alpha positioned as a domestic android.
- Home and consumer early adopters (Clone Alpha). The first production run is a limited edition of 279 Clone Alpha units, sold to early adopters and paired with the Telekinesis training platform. Marketing framing emphasizes household tasks, companionship, and skill-teaching by demonstration.
- Research and academic labs. Biomimetic robotics, soft-actuator research, and human-motion modeling groups are a natural fit for the Protoclone / Clone Alpha platform, which is one of very few musculoskeletal androids available outside a single research lab.
- Longer-term commercial and industrial applications. Company statements have signaled ambitions well beyond the home, including labor-substitution use cases, but no large-scale industrial customer or automotive pilot has been announced to date.
The robotics supply chain — where Hybrid Electronics fits in
A modern humanoid robot is one of the most component-dense products ever built. A single Clone-class platform depends on thousands of individual electronic components: precision BLDC motor drivers for the pump and auxiliary actuators, proportional-valve solenoid drivers, pressure and flow sensors on every hydraulic branch, IMUs and 6-DoF force-torque sensors, LiDAR and time-of-flight modules, GPU compute boards, battery-management ICs, wide-bandgap SiC/GaN power semiconductors, high-speed board-to-board connectors, precision resistors, and thousands of MLCC capacitors distributed across every power and signal rail.
Building that kind of hardware puts enormous pressure on the electronic-components supply chain. Prototype pilots and low-volume production runs frequently hit allocation, EOL notices, and long lead times on the exact parts they need, and R&D and field-service teams routinely have to support older platforms that use semiconductors no longer in mainstream distribution. During the current humanoid robotics and general-purpose robot AI boom, this pressure is amplified: dozens of well-funded teams are chasing the same short list of high-current motor drivers, precision IMUs, GPU compute modules, and automotive-grade power semiconductors, and franchise stock on many key parts is now measured in months of lead time rather than weeks.
Hybrid Electronics has been sourcing electronic components for industrial and embedded systems since 1995. For robotics teams — humanoid, mobile, industrial, and research — we specialize in finding the parts you need when mainstream distribution can't:
Obsolete and end-of-life parts
Legacy semiconductors, sensors, connectors, and passives that are no longer in mainstream distribution — the parts that keep older platforms running during transitions to newer hardware, and the long-tail items that block a BOM from closing.
Allocated and hard-to-find active parts
High-current motor drivers, proportional-valve and solenoid drivers, IMUs and MEMS sensors, pressure and flow sensors, SiC/GaN power devices, GPU compute modules, precision resistors, and MLCC capacitors caught in allocation or long-lead times. Send us a BOM or a shortage list — we'll confirm what we can source and at what lead time.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded Clone Robotics?
Clone Robotics was founded in late 2021 by Dhanush Radhakrishnan and Polish engineer Łukasz Koźlik, whose earlier artificial-muscle work went viral online. Radhakrishnan serves as CEO and Koźlik as CTO. The company is headquartered in Wrocław, Poland, with a US office in Mountain View, California.
What is Clone Alpha?
Clone Alpha is Clone Robotics' flagship musculoskeletal android. It is built around a 206-bone polymer skeleton, more than 1,000 proprietary Myofiber artificial muscles, and a water-based hydraulic vascular system driven by a 500-watt electric pump. The first production run is limited to 279 units, with preorders opened in December 2024, and is paired with the company's Telekinesis training platform.
Where are Clone Robotics androids deployed commercially?
Clone Alpha is being sold to early customers as a domestic, home-focused android, paired with the Telekinesis training platform. Clone Robotics has not announced any large-scale industrial deployment; the initial rollout is a limited 279-unit run to consumer and research early adopters rather than a factory-floor pilot.
How much has Clone Robotics raised?
Public funding databases show approximately $7 million in a 2023 seed round from investors including Pioneer Fund, Lux Capital, Tango.vc, Initialized Capital, and Access VC, with early angel backing from Y Combinator co-founder Trevor Blackwell. Company statements in 2026 have referenced roughly $17 million raised to date and an active $50 million round; that larger round has not yet been reported as closed in public funding databases.
Is Hybrid Electronics affiliated with Clone Robotics?
No. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company. We are not a distributor, reseller, or partner of Clone Robotics. All trademarks are property of their respective owners. Hybrid supports robotics developers by sourcing obsolete, allocated, and hard-to-find semiconductors, sensors, connectors, and passives for R&D, prototype, and low-volume production builds.
Can Hybrid help with components for humanoid robotics builds?
Yes. We regularly support R&D and integrator teams with hard-to-find semiconductors, BLDC motor-driver ICs, IMUs and other MEMS sensors, connectors, SiC/GaN power devices, solenoid and proportional-valve drivers, pressure sensors, and precision passives for the industrial and embedded boards used in robotics platforms. Send us a BOM or a short list of shortages and we'll confirm availability and pricing.
Trademark and affiliation notice. Clone Robotics®, Clone Alpha, Protoclone, and Myofiber are trademarks of Clone, Inc. and Clone Sp. z o.o. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by Clone, Inc. or Clone Sp. z o.o. All information on this page is compiled from public sources for educational and reference purposes.