Theseus says its wheeled humanoid works Zurich night shifts. The number is its own

Theseus Robotics, a Zurich startup in Y Combinator's Fall 2026 batch, says its wheeled humanoid Theo is already working nights in a live Zurich supermarket, restocking shelves in the dark at up to 400 items an hour and picking online orders during the day. That rate is the company's own presentation figure, not a measurement anyone outside Theseus has checked, and it is the only throughput number on offer.

Two arms on a base anyone can buy

Theo is a pair of arms on a wheeled platform, a shape the company says it picked so the robot can roll down existing aisles without the store being refitted. According to its Y Combinator profile, Theseus does not build that platform. It buys "proven wheeled, two-armed robots" and writes the operating system and models on top: perception that finds a grasp point, learned skills for picking everything from yoghurt cups to cases of water, planogram and delivery-list integration that decides what goes where and rotates stock.

That split is the actual news. Xiaomi ran its own humanoid through an eight-hour shift on its production line and published no throughput figure for it. Theseus is betting the body becomes a commodity and the difficult, defensible part is teaching software to cope with a supermarket that reorganises itself every week.

Where the numbers stop

Restocking runs to 400 units an hour, the same profile says, and order picking to 40 — a tenth of the night rate, which is a fair hint at how much harder the daytime job is. Neither figure carries a success rate, an intervention count or a store name, and the retailer has not said anything publicly. Theseus also lists "seamless teleoperation" among its capabilities, framed as a way to deploy quickly and collect data to scale autonomy. Fast deployment and autonomy are not the same claim, and only one of them is being sold.

Denmark is running the same test more slowly

Salling Group is trialling humanoids for overnight restocking at its Føtex stores in Denmark, with staff guiding movements while the robots train and autonomy targeted for 2027; the retailer puts shelf-stacking at 40 to 50 percent of staff time, per AlexTech.ai's coverage. Two Theseus robots are in live deployments, with pilot slots for up to ten more allocated for 2027, the company says.

So the deliverable for sale right now is a pilot, not a fleet, and the pitch is integration labour rather than machinery. Whether 400 items an hour survives a store that is not cooperating will be settled by whichever retailer eventually puts its name to one.