Devanthro
Devanthro is a Munich company that grew out of the Roboy tendon-driven humanoid research project and builds Robody, a teleoperated care avatar for nursing homes.
- Type
- startup
- Headquarters
- Munich, Germany, Germany
- Founded
- 2018-05
- Founders
- Rafael Hostettler, Alona Pammer
- Status
- active
- Employees (est.)
- n/d
- Disclosed funding
- n/d
- Valuation
- n/d
- Listed
- private
- Website
- devanthro.com
What the record says.
Devanthro was founded in Munich in May 2018 by Rafael Hostettler, who is CEO, and Alona Pammer (formerly Kharchenko), who is CTO. It is the commercial continuation of Roboy, a tendon-driven humanoid research effort that started at the University of Zurich in March 2013 and moved to a TU Munich student team in October 2014. Roboy 2.0 was finished in April 2018 and entered the Deutsches Museum's permanent collection in July 2022.
In May 2023 the company says it pivoted from research to home care. Its product, Robody, is a wheeled humanoid driven remotely through a VR headset by carers or relatives; the pitch is remote human presence rather than autonomy. Home pilots with seniors began in March 2024 and a new generation was shown in November 2024. The company says Robody was tried in more than 12 care locations with hundreds of elderly users during 2025.
Public money has come through research projects such as Teleskoop, a three-year study with FZI and Charite funded by the German education ministry with 690,000 euros, in which Robody worked 23 days in private households. No private funding round, revenue, pricing or headcount has been published, and deployments so far are pilots rather than paid rollouts, which the company itself schedules for 2026 onward.
2 humanoids tracked.
Robody
Robody is Devanthro's wheeled humanoid avatar that lets remote caregivers be present in nursing homes through VR teleoperation. Devanthro, based in Munich, spun the concept out of the Roboy research project.
Roboy
Roboy was created at the University of Zurich's AI Lab in 2013 as a tendon-driven humanoid mimicking human musculature, and later developed at TU Munich as Roboy 2.0 and 3.0. It is the research origin of Devanthro's Robody telepresence robots.
Europe's humanoids: who builds them and what you can order
31 of the 182 humanoids on record come from seven European countries. Three can be ordered, two have a price, and the dearest of those is $75,000 for a robot that does not walk.
Open-source humanoids: what you can actually build
24 of the 182 humanoids on record call themselves open source. 15 publish hardware files and software, 3 name a licence, 12 can be ordered, and none of the four on preorder has any autonomy evidence yet.
Sources
- 01DevanthroDevanthro
- 02About usDevanthro
- 03Conclusion of the Teleskoop Research Project: Robotics for Future CareFZI Forschungszentrum Informatik