Inside an atypical new build office in Oslo, kitted out with wooden panels on the outside, engineer and serial entrepreneur Knut Sandven holds up a small rectangular piece of equipment with 16 tiny ultrasonic sensors on it. Those sensors, he tells me, are similar to the ones that allow cars to “see” their surroundings, but on a miniature scale.

“This little thing has the same performance,” he says. “You can then integrate these devices into all kinds of electronics and get reliable distance measurement.”

The 22-person team of Sonair, which counts Sandven as its CEO, was inspired by how medical ultrasound uses sound to create images of tissue, and its device is designed to do the same in air, but focused on providing 3D positioning information. The system sends out sounds and listens to the echoes, which is the same principle that bats use for navigation and detecting objects — “we are kind of a bat for industrial applications.”

It plans to sell the device to robot makers, and in doing so, Sandven hopes it’ll help companies in the sector overcome one of the bottlenecks holding back progress: perception, the ability for robots to gauge the distance of things in their surroundings and perform tasks based on that information.

“We have enough information to position objects in 3D,” Sandven says.

Can Sonair make humanoids safe?

Sandven says it’s not focused on retrofitting its devices to existing robots — though it can. Instead it wants to sell to companies building the next generation of industrial robots and AMRs (Autonomous Mobile Robots) used in logistics and warehouses. It’s also going after the humanoid market, and is talking to “several” humanoid manufacturers, Sandven tells Sifted.

The humanoid market has been flexing its muscles on social media for a while. It’s hard not to scroll LinkedIn or Twitter without seeing demo videos of human-looking robots folding laundry, cleaning or doing backflips.

Fundraising for such companies is on a tear this year. Humanoid robotics companies have raised $3.2bn globally in 2025, according to Dealroom, more than the previous six years combined. Big Tech companies including Tesla, Amazon and OpenAI are also all developing hardware or software for humanoid robotics.

One appeal of deploying Sonair’s tech on humanoids is additional safety around humans. Industry insiders tell Sifted that one of the reasons the timeline for mass deployment of humanoids in the home is years, if not decades away, is that they are heavy and still can’t manoeuvre their environments perfectly, making them a threat to humans. It’s less than ideal if one of them was to clatter into someone, or fall on someone because it misread where it was in its environment.

“They need the safety aspect of this,” Sandven says.

One local humanoid company that’s caused a stir recently is the Norwegian-US startup 1X, which is planning to roll out its humanoid robot Neo in US homes next year. The company has recently opened its wait list for consumers.

1X Technologies’ humanoid Neo

Plenty of people within the tech sector have already signed up. Stockholm-based SSE Business Lab’s CEO, Isabel Keulen, is one of those who will have a humanoid delivered in two years.

“Neo weighs only about 30kg, which is significantly lighter than other humanoids,” she says. That said, “it is also very slow and clumsy. It needs to be trained to do things, and for more complex tasks it needs to be radio-controlled by 1X operators.

“Because it is so slow and light, the risk of damage is quite small. But 3D vision becomes critical when it is going to navigate independently instead of being radio-controlled,” Keulen adds.

A lot can happen in a year, but as of today, humanoid robots can’t safely operate around people, says Sandven. “No humanoid can do that today, even if [the manufacturers] say so,” Sandven says. “That is being developed now.”

Big opportunities in Germany

Spun out from research at the Norwegian research company SINTEF, Sonair raised $6m in funding in September from Norwegian investors Skyfall Ventures, RunwayFBU, SINTEF Venture VI and Danish VC Scale.

Sandven says it chose Norwegian investors that had backed one of his previous companies, industrial gas startup GasSecure, which was acquired by German Drägerwerk in 2015.

“They gave us reasonable terms and the risk is so much lower if you know them and what they stand for and how it is to work with them,” Sandven says.

“We chose Scale as our European investor since we wanted someone familiar with the western US market and scaling in the US. And that’s what Scale has done and are really good at.”

Sonair launched its first test kit a year ago, making it available to 10 early adopter companies. It now has more than 40 robotics customers paying to test its tech across the US, Europe and Asia. Sonair sells its device for around $2,000.

In addition to its office in Oslo, it has also opened one in Odense, known for its robotics companies, in Denmark. It’s focused on Europe first, but has plans for US expansion.

“There’s so much to handle now in Europe so Europe will come first with Germany being a really big market for us,” he says. “We want to have a little more traction and volumes in the US before we start investing there. Because when you do it, we will really have to invest in that.”