InMoov (Gael Langevin)

InMoov is not a company. It is a personal project of Gael Langevin, a French sculptor and designer who had spent about 25 years making models and props for brands and who began work on a 3D printed hand in September 2011. He posted the first files on Thingiverse in January 2012 and kept adding parts, so that the hand grew into a forearm, arm, shoulders, torso and head. Everything is released under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial licence.

The design is deliberately modest: every piece fits a hobby printer with a 12 cm cube build area, control runs on Arduino boards and the open-source MyRobotLab software, and Wikipedia puts the cost of a full build at around 1,500 US dollars. The result is a life-size humanoid that can see through small cameras, hear, speak and move its arms and head. The prototype was shown at Maker Faire Rome in 2013, where it drew interest as a base for cheap prosthetics.

InMoov's importance is in how many copies exist rather than in any one of them. It has been built by hobbyists, schools and university labs around the world, and inspired the Bionico and e-NABLE prosthetics projects. There is no revenue, headcount or funding to report.