The most telling detail about Devanthro’s humanoid robot is not its arms or its cameras, but the Oculus Quest headset hanging on a wall in Munich. The headset is the bridge, the point where a human operator steps into the machine. For a company whose tagline is “The Robody Company,” the real product is not just a robot, but a connection.
Devanthro, founded in 2018 by Rafael Hostettler and Alona Pammer, builds “Robodies,” humanoid robotic avatars designed for domestic environments, starting with elderly care. The system is a hybrid: onboard AI handles routine navigation and object manipulation, while a remote human, wearing a VR headset and using haptic controllers, can be teleported into the robot to provide complex assistance, empathy, and judgment. Since 2024, the company says its platform has been deployed in real homes, making it, by its own claim, the first with humanoid robots legally used in domestic settings [Munich Startup, 2025].
The wedge is a human in the loop
Most robotics startups racing toward the home are betting everything on autonomy. Devanthro’s contrarian angle is that this is a sucker’s bet, at least for the messy, unpredictable world of personal care. Their wedge is teleoperation. A caregiver can put on a headset, see through the robot’s eyes, hear through its microphones, and speak with their own voice. The robot becomes their physical avatar.
A founder track record built for hard problems
The founders’ backgrounds read as a direct response to the immense difficulty of the problem. Hostettler is a serial founder who previously launched a CE- and FDA-certified MedTech company, raising €4 million and holding multiple patents [Munich Startup, 2025]. His co-founder, Alona Pammer, brings deep technical robotics experience and recognition, having been listed in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 and named one of ‘20 Women in Robotics You Need to Know 2025’ [Munich Startup, 2025].
Piloting in the wild
Traction, in Devanthro’s case, is measured in homes and research projects. The company has developed over three hardware generations and recently completed a dedicated pilot, “Robody Cares,” where its newest robot was secretly tested in three private households [DEVANTHRO]. It also participated in the Teleskoop Research Project, where a prototype remained permanently in households and was controlled via VR and haptic controllers [FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik, 2025].
The scalability question
For all its cleverness, Devanthro’s model introduces a fundamental tension. The very thing that makes it viable today, the human operator, is also its primary scalability bottleneck and cost center. The company’s answer appears to be a gradual handoff: as the robots collect more data and the AI improves, the ratio of machines per operator should increase, driving down cost per hour of care.
The next twelve months
The immediate roadmap likely involves expanding pilot partnerships to move from a few homes to a few dozen. Securing institutional funding, which has so far remained undisclosed, would be a major signal of outside belief in the hybrid model. Europe faces an acute shortage of 4.3 million caregivers [Munich Startup, 2025]. The math only works if the total system cost comes in below the local cost of in-person care. That’s the equation Devanthro is solving in real time, in real homes.