Barcelona-based AI robotics company THEKER on June 11 announced a €73 million ($85 million) Series A — what the company says is the largest robotics Series A round ever raised in Europe — to scale deployments of its AI-native generalist robots inside tier-one industrial operators.
Who Backed The Round
CRV led, with participation from Samsung, LVMH, Cathay Innovation, Harry Stebbings' 20VC, Henkel Ventures, Korelya and Bright Pixel Capital (Sonae). The round marks Samsung's first-ever investment in a Spanish company, LVMH's first bet on Spain's startup ecosystem, and one of CRV's earliest moves into the country. "THEKER is solving one of the most important challenges in robotics: bringing general-purpose AI into real production environments where reliability, adaptability and scale actually matter," CRV general partner Reid Christian said.
What THEKER Builds
Founded by robotics and AI engineers Carla Gómez Cano and Jiaqiang Ye Zhu, THEKER is building generalist robots that adapt in real time to changing environments, mixed SKUs, irregular shapes and operational variability — without manual reprogramming. The company says its systems deploy in days, continuously learn in production and operate autonomously in real-world manufacturing, logistics and retail settings. "We didn't build THEKER to run pilots. We built it to ship robots that work the day they arrive and continue improving every day after," co-founder Gómez Cano said.
Why It Matters
Europe's industrial base needs flexible automation faster than traditional robotic integrators can deploy it. THEKER joins a wave of European robotics financings — Germany's NEURA Robotics $1.4B Series C, Stuttgart-based Sereact's €93M Series B and Norway/US-based Trener Robotics' €26M Series A — that together signal a sharp pull-forward of physical AI capital into the region.
What Comes Next
THEKER says the new capital will accelerate commercial deployments with tier-one operators, deepen its proprietary AI and robotics stack, and expand the team across software, electronics, mechanical engineering and field deployment. The round comes less than a year after the company closed Spain's largest-ever seed at €18 million, underscoring how fast it has moved from breakthrough technology to live production deployments — and how aggressively non-traditional investors like luxury group LVMH are now chasing exposure to the physical-AI build-out, alongside other recent large industrial robotics rounds.
Reporting based on coverage from EU-Startups, Tech.eu and CRV.