SoftBank is in early talks to back a roughly $800 million funding round for Agile Robots, the Munich-based robotics company spun out of the German Aerospace Center, according to a report from The Next Web. If completed, the round would deepen Masayoshi Son's industrial-humanoid bet and rank as one of the largest European robotics financings of 2026.
What SoftBank brings
The Japanese group would contribute more than $300 million of the new round, supplementing an existing investor base that includes Sequoia China, Atomico and Linus Capital. SoftBank Vision Fund has been buying into the humanoid and physical-AI thesis with positions in Unitree-powered deployments and other applied-robotics names; Agile Robots would add the most direct European industrial automation stake to that portfolio.
Inside Agile Robots
Founded in 2018 by former DLR researchers Zhaopeng Chen and Peter Meusel, Agile Robots designs torque-controlled arms, mobile manipulators and humanoid platforms aimed at logistics, electronics manufacturing and lab automation. Its core differentiator is a force-control technology stack that allows arms to perform delicate manipulation tasks without traditional teach-and-repeat programming. The company has expanded aggressively in China alongside its German operations and now employs roughly 2,000 people globally.
Why the timing matters
The talks come as European robotics investors look to defend the region's industrial automation lead against Chinese humanoid programmes and a US humanoid land-grab led by Mobileye's $900M Mentee buy and Apptronik's $5B-plus valuation. Agile Robots sits between those camps: less consumer-facing than Unitree, but more general-purpose than the production-line arms supplied by Kuka or ABB.
Terms and amounts could still change, the report cautioned. But the appetite is clearly there: even with public-market investors getting choosier, growth-stage robotics rounds north of half a billion dollars are increasingly the norm, not the exception.
Reporting based on coverage from The Next Web and TechFundingNews.