Insider Brief
- European robotics deployment company microagi raised $55 million in seed funding to expand Atlas, its robotics data and deployment platform for industrial companies.
- Hummingbird led the round, with participation from Northzone, LocalGlobe, Village Global and redalpine, and called it the largest seed financing in German history.
- microagi said Atlas captures factory data, expands it in simulation and fine-tunes models for plant-specific robotics tasks, helping manufacturers move robots from demonstrations into production.
European robotics deployment company microagi has raised $55 million in seed funding to expand Atlas, its data and deployment platform for industrial companies.
According to the Munich-based company, Hummingbird led the investment, with participation from Northzone, LocalGlobe, Village Global and redalpine. The financing, what the company said is the largest seed financing in German history, comes about 10 months after microagi was founded by former Formula 1 engineers from Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG Petronas. The company said it will use the funding to scale Atlas with large industrial customers.
The company doesn’t build robots, but rather microagi is building a platform designed to help manufacturers move robots from demonstrations into production. Its view is that many robots can complete most of a factory task in controlled settings, but struggle with the final details needed to work reliably on a live production line.
The company is marketing Atlas as a data and deployment layer between existing factory infrastructure and frontier AI models that will help companies deploy robots faster, more safely and more accurately in live industrial settings.
Europe’s industrial base is a central part of the company’s pitch. The company cited pressure from lower manufacturing output, an aging workforce and higher energy costs, as well as a widening robotics installation gap with China, where 295,000 factory robots, or 54% of the global total, were installed in 2024. Europe, on the ther hand, installed 85,000, or 16%.
“Industrial Europe has 12 to 18 months to build its robotic edge,” founder and CEO Bercan Kilic said in the announcement. “We cannot afford to repeat Europe’s hesitation on AI. If you run factories in Europe, the maths is already on your desk. Your most experienced people retire this decade, and their replacements were never born.”
The platform captures operational data inside factories using dedicated recording hardware and a secure software layer built for training-quality data and privacy. It then expands that data in simulation and fine-tunes models for plant-specific tasks.
The company also uses forward-deployed engineers and partners, including Nvidia and Unitree, to put robots onto factory floors. microagi said the approach is designed to create a loop in which robots learn from real operations and improve over time.
“Our partners build genuinely good robots and models,” added CTO Nico Nussbaum. “Our job starts after that, on the factory floor. 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, so every month we’re there they pull a little further ahead of their competitors.”
The platform is hardware- and model-agnostic, meaning it is intended to work across different robot makers and AI models. microagi said that design is meant to help industrial customers avoid being locked into a single vendor, model provider or supply chain.
microagi recently opened a global research headquarters in Zurich and has recruited from ETH Zurich, the Technical University of Munich, DeepMind, Apple and Replit. The company is headquartered in Munich, with additional offices in London and New York.
Credit: microagi
