London and Sydney-based Reimagine Robotics emerged from stealth on August 3, 2026, unveiling an AI platform that lets factory workers train industrial robots by demonstration and closing a pre-seed round backed by Fly Ventures, firstminute capital and a group of angel investors. The company has not disclosed the round size.
Ex-DeepMind team goes after floor-level programming
Reimagine was co-founded in April 2025 by CEO Jonathan Scholz, who built and ran Google DeepMind's Applied Robotics team in London for seven years, alongside former colleagues Oleg Sushkov, Akhil Raju and Misha Denil. Instead of relying on specialist programmers whenever a task or production process changes, the startup's platform lets operators show a robot how to do a job, correct it mid-attempt and move on, an approach the founders call “monkey-see, monkey-do.”
Robots already tending 3D printers and shredding hard drives
The team is not starting from theory. At a made-to-order plastics business, Reimagine trained robots to tend a bank of 3D printers overnight, removing print beds, operating latches and pressing controls. In a separate deployment focused on critical materials recovery from used hard drives, it stood up a three-robot disassembly cell that combines automation with human process engineers to optimize the workflow in real time. Reimagine says its tooling has cut the time to prototype a new robot behavior from around a day to about 10 minutes.
Where the pre-seed money goes next
Scholz said the next stage is about hiring more deployment engineers, putting robots into more workplaces and lining up a proper seed round on top of the pre-seed. The company will also invest in making each new deployment cheaper and faster than the last, in a market where competitors including Apptronik, Google DeepMind and mimic Robotics are racing to make general-purpose robots easier to teach on the shop floor.
Reporting based on coverage from The Robot Report and FinSMEs.