SCHAFT

SCHAFT Inc. was a Tokyo startup spun out of the University of Tokyo's JSK robotics laboratory in 2012 by Yuto Nakanishi, Junichi Urata, Narito Suzuki and Koichi Nishiwaki. Its robot S-One, an electrically driven biped at a time when serious humanoids were hydraulic, stood 130 cm and weighed 95 kg.

Google bought the company in December 2013, one of the seven robotics firms Andy Rubin collected that year. The same month S-One won the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials with 27 of 32 points, seven ahead of IHMC, losing points only on the vehicle egress task. The company then went silent inside Alphabet's X division. The only later public appearance was at the New Economic Summit in Tokyo on 8 April 2016, where Nakanishi showed an unnamed biped with rail-like sliding legs walking on a forest floor, a rocky beach, snow and stairs while carrying a barbell; X said it was not a product announcement.

Alphabet agreed in June 2017 to sell SCHAFT to SoftBank together with Boston Dynamics, but the SCHAFT part of the deal collapsed, reportedly because staff refused to transfer. Alphabet shut the company down in November 2018 after finding no other buyer. SCHAFT never sold a robot.