Munich robot startup raises $55m in Germany's largest seed round
A Munich startup has secured Germany’s largest ever seed round to train humanoid robots, a move its founders say is urgently needed to stop Europe’s manufacturing sector from crumbling.
Munich-based Microagi has raised $55m in Germany’s largest ever seed round, just 10 months after being founded by former Formula 1 engineers. The round was led by Hummingbird, with participation from Northzone, LocalGlobe, Village Global and Redalpine.
The company collects factory and household data to train the next generation of humanoid bots. To capture this information, Microagi sends humans wearing headcams into factories and private homes to gather visual data on routine tasks like sorting items and cleaning dishes.
“We put our engineers on site with each customer, and the system learns from their real operations and feeds that back into the next run," says CTO Nico Nussbaum. "So every month we're there they pull a little further ahead of their competitors.”
The capital injection highlights a growing anxiety over European industrial competitiveness. CEO Bercan Kilic warns that the continent's manufacturing industry will crumble unless it invests heavily into robot automation. He argues that decades of offshoring have eroded vital domestic capabilities. “In the last 60 years, we’ve offshored a lot to the east, so there are many skills we never mastered in Europe," the former Red Bull Racing engineer says. "We've fallen behind in our ability to do things in-house, and we've lost price-competitiveness.”
Microagi is entering a fierce global race where investors are pouring billions into robotics startups. While nobody knows exactly how much data is needed to train these machines, startups are betting on needing a massive amount. Kilic notes that training models are currently “more advanced in the western world”, whereas China leads on robot hardware.
Timelines for when competent humanoids will actually join the workforce remain heavily disputed. At last week's Machina robot gathering in Paris, one investor estimated it would take 10 years before a robot could iron a shirt unaided. Kilic offers a much faster forecast, predicting a humanoid will handle roughly 10 routine tasks autonomously within a year. “A robot that is able to do something more complex, like plumbing, will take a lot longer,” he adds.
Despite the record funding, Microagi’s website features an image of a humanoid pushing a boulder up a mountain. The $55m round represents a milestone, but Kilic remains grounded about the sheer scale of the challenge. “It’s one-billionth of what Europe needs,” he says.
