Munich-based robotics startup microagi has closed a $55 million seed round to scale Atlas, its factory-floor deployment platform, in what backers are calling the largest seed financing in German history. VC firm Hummingbird led the round, with participation from Northzone, LocalGlobe, Village Global and redalpine.
An F1 engineer's bet on Europe's factory floor
Founded roughly 10 months ago by former Formula 1 engineers from Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG Petronas, microagi doesn't build robots. Instead, its Atlas platform sits between customers' existing hardware and frontier AI models, capturing operational data on the production line, expanding it in simulation and fine-tuning task-specific control policies. CEO Bercan Kilic argues industrial Europe has "12 to 18 months to build its robotic edge" as an aging workforce retires and Chinese factory-robot installations pull further ahead.
How Atlas works
Recording hardware on the line captures demonstrations from experienced workers, the data is expanded in simulation, and the resulting policies transfer onto whatever robot suits the task. microagi pairs its platform with forward-deployed engineers and partners including NVIDIA and Unitree Robotics, then feeds real production data back into subsequent training runs.
Europe's biggest seed at a physical-AI inflection point
The round lands in a market where physical-AI capital has been racing to catch up with Chinese robotics deployments. It sits in the same funding wave that produced Walden Robotics' $300M stealth exit and NEURA Robotics' $1.4B Series C, though microagi is deliberately hardware-agnostic. The company has now opened a global research HQ in Zurich, with additional offices in London and New York, and is recruiting from ETH Zurich, TU Munich, DeepMind, Apple and Replit.
Reporting based on coverage from Sifted, AI Insider and Dealroom.