- Barcelona robotics startup THEKER has raised $85M in what it says is Europe’s largest robotics Series A.
- The round marks three simultaneous firsts: CRV’s first Spanish investment, Samsung’s first bet on a Spanish company, and LVMH’s first entry into the Spanish startup ecosystem.
- THEKER’s robots are already running inside live Inditex production facilities — a distinction the company says very few robotics companies globally have achieved.
Carla Gómez Cano, co-founder at THEKER, Barcelona-based industrial robotics company, wasn’t planning to raise.
“Part of a founder’s job is that when people of this calibre knock on the door, you take the meeting. That’s how most of these conversations started,” she tells Tech Funding News.
The result is $85M and a set of investor firsts that are hard to explain away as a coincidence. The Spanish startup Gómez Cano, co-founded in 2022 with engineer Jiaqiang Ye Zhu, has closed what it describes as the largest robotics Series A ever raised in Europe.
The round was led by CRV, the 56-year-old Silicon Valley firm behind seed bets on DoorDash and Series A rounds for Mercury and Vercel, making one of its first investments in Spain.
Samsung joined as a new backer, with its first investment in any Spanish company, as did LVMH, the luxury conglomerate behind Louis Vuitton and Dior, making its first bet on the Spanish startup ecosystem. Bright Pixel Capital, Cathay Innovation, 20VC, Henkel Ventures, Korelya, angel investor Carles Reina, Itnig, and Mission participated. Returning investors Inditex, Kfund, and Kibo Ventures also committed.
“CRV, Samsung, and LVMH each look at that from a different angle — venture, consumer technology, luxury — but they’re backing the same thing: a deeply technical platform paired with real commercial deployment,” Gómez Cano explains.
The raise brings total funding to approximately $106M, following the €18 million seed round in July 2025 — itself the largest early-stage round in Spanish startup history. As TFN has reported, Spanish startups raised €3.1 billion in venture capital in 2025, with THEKER now its most internationally visible breakout story.
From research lab to production line
The gap Gómez Cano describes is where most robotics companies quietly die. Making a robot perform in a controlled demo is straightforward. Making it work inside a live Inditex facility, on a line processing thousands of mixed products per shift that doesn’t stop for you, is something else entirely.
THEKER builds AI generalist robots that adapt in real time to irregular product types, variable packaging, and shifting environments without requiring manual reprogramming whenever conditions change. A robot already deployed inside an Inditex facility, for example, can handle a shift from one garment type to another without an engineer having to touch the configuration.
What got THEKER there, Gómez Cano says, was a choice made at founding.
“Besides the technical side, a very important factor is the DNA of the company. From day one, we took a very pragmatic approach to technology: we never wanted to build a research lab, we wanted to solve real problems,” she adds.
A different race from the humanoid giants
The robotics sector attracted $27.6 billion in funding in 2025, almost double the year before, with the bulk flowing toward humanoid machines.
Figure AI closed a Series C at a $39B valuation in September 2025, Apptronik extended its Series A to $935M at a $5.5B valuation in February 2026, and NEURA Robotics just raised $1.4B in March 2026, becoming Europe’s most-funded humanoid company.
THEKER, however, is not in that race. It targets environments where automation spend is already proven, and the return-on-investment case is immediate rather than theoretical.
That positioning is also its competitive risk. Fixed-task industrial robotics giants like ABB, FANUC, and KUKA have decades of experience in enterprise relationships and distribution. The argument THEKER has to win is that AI-native adaptability justifies replacing or supplementing incumbents that require expensive, time-consuming reprogramming for every new product line.
So far, the Inditex relationship, one of the most operationally demanding retailers in the world, is the clearest evidence that it is winning that argument.
The market and the moment
The timing is deliberate: the global industrial robotics sector is valued at approximately $54B in 2026 and is projected to reach $94B by 2031, at a compound annual growth rate of 11.7%. Labour shortages in manufacturing and logistics, rising operational costs, and the maturation of AI vision and control systems have combined to make the business case for adaptive automation more compelling than at any previous point.
“What Carla, Jiaqiang and the team have built is exceptionally rare, a deeply technical platform paired with real commercial deployment momentum. We believe THEKER has the potential to become one of the defining robotics companies of this generation,” says Reid Christian, general partner at CRV.
The company, which now employs between 20 and 50 people, will use the $85M to accelerate deployments with tier-one industrial operators, deepen its AI and robotics stack, and grow its team across software, electronics, mechanical engineering, and operations to 100 people by the end of 2026 or early 2027.
There is a version of this story about Barcelona emerging as a serious tech hub, about European robotics finally finding its footing, about luxury, consumer electronics, and venture capital converging on a shared bet. All of that may be true.
But the more interesting question is simpler: can a 50-person company in Spain, backed by investors who have never touched Spanish startups before, build robots that actually work at global scale? THEKER’s answer, so far, is to keep shipping and let the production line speak.
