- microagi, a Munich robotics startup founded by former Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 engineers, has raised $55 million in the largest seed round in German history, led by Hummingbird.
- Its platform, Atlas, fine-tunes AI models on a factory’s own operational data so robots clear the “last mile” gap between an impressive demo and reliable, unsupervised work on the line.
- The raise lands as Europe’s robot deficit widens: the continent installed 85,000 factory robots in 2024 versus China’s 295,000, even as nearly 40 million EU workers are over 55 and heading toward retirement
Munich-based robotics startup microagi has raised $55 million in what it says is the largest seed round in German history, led by Hummingbird Ventures, with participation from Northzone, LocalGlobe, Village Global, and redalpine, just 10 months after the company was founded.
The raise is unusual not just for its size but for the team behind it. microagi was built around 5 cofounders whose backgrounds span the width of a very odd Venn diagram: Bercan Kilic, a former aerodynamics engineer at Red Bull Racing and ex-professional esports player; Yoan Iliev, formerly of Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1; Anton Poletaev, a former researcher at the Alan Turing Institute; Nico Nussbaum, an engineer from RWTH Aachen; and Artjem Weissbeck, co-founder of WhatsApp commerce platform Charles and Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe alumnus.
The five of them started the company in September 2025 out of what Weissbeck described as a Munich “HackerPenthouse,” took a pre-seed round in November, and closed a $55M seed less than a year later.
What microagi actually does
The company’s core product, Atlas, addresses what the robotics industry calls the “last mile” problem: robots can be impressive in demos but unreliable on actual factory floors. microagi’s platform captures operational data directly from factory workers using cameras and sensor-equipped gloves, recreates those conditions in simulation, and fine-tunes existing AI foundation models for a specific plant’s specific tasks. Forward-deployed engineers then put robots to work on-site, feeding results back into the next training run.
Critically, microagi does not build its own robots or its own models. Atlas is designed to be hardware- and model-agnostic, working with partners including Unitree and NVIDIA. The pitch is that most robotics failures are data problems, a robot can perform a task with roughly 95% reliability and then stall, because the last few percentage points come only from a factory’s own edge cases.
The viral consumer arm
Separate from its industrial business, microagi runs a consumer-facing arm called shift, which became something of a viral moment earlier this year. The app offered New York City residents free professional apartment cleanings, on the condition that cleaners wore head-mounted cameras recording every task from first-person view. The footage, once anonymised, feeds into robot training data. The launch video, set to Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind,” racked up nearly 8 million views. The 250 initial NYC slots sold out immediately. microagi has since expanded shift to offer private chefs in San Francisco, with London, Munich, and Zurich to follow.
The shift operation is now considerably larger than a publicity stunt. The company pays operators around $20 per hour to wear cameras while performing daily tasks, with more than 10,000 operators across 15 countries collectively earning over $5 million in the first quarter of 2026 alone.
The investment case and the clock
Hummingbird’s managing partner Firat Ileri, who led the investment, framed the bet explicitly around European talent retention: “Europe trains some of the best roboticists in the world, then watches them build companies in California. What it has lacked is ambition on a meaningful scale. microagi has gathered some of the most ambitious people we have met, kept them in Europe, and aimed them at one of the hardest problems there is.” Hummingbird’s prior investments include early bets on Lovable, Kraken, and BillionToOne.
Kilic frames the urgency in demographic terms. The EU’s median age hit 44.9 in 2025, up from 39.6 two decades earlier, and the European Commission estimates the bloc could lose 18.8 million workers by 2050. “Industrial Europe has 12 to 18 months to build its robotic edge,” he said. “Your most experienced people retire this decade, and their replacements were never born.”
The capital will be used to expand Atlas across global manufacturers, scale the shift data collection network, grow a US presence from New York, and build out microagi’s research headquarters in Zurich — chosen over San Francisco for its density of robotics talent. microagi currently employs 37 people; shift runs approximately 75 staff.
A crowded race
microagi is not alone in this deployment race. The global industrial robotics market was worth roughly $18.5 billion in 2025 and is projected to top $44 billion by 2030, according to Grand View Research, while global robotics funding overall hit $27.6 billion in 2025, up 101% year-on-year, per PitchBook.
Munich neighbour NEURA Robotics closed a Series C of up to $1.4 billion in June, backed by Tether, Amazon, and NVIDIA, building hardware, AI, and data infrastructure in-house rather than staying model-agnostic. Globally, microagi sits in a field that includes Figure AI, valued at around $39 billion, Skild AI, which has raised $1.4 billion at a $14 billion valuation, and OpenAI-backed Physical Intelligence, which has raised $400 million.
Kilic has likened the current state of the industry to a GPT-2 moment for robotics — scaling data produces predictable gains, and the sector is approaching a GPT-3.5 moment of broad utility. His five-year target is unambiguous: 20 to 30 million robots deployed. “In five years, if we haven’t deployed more than 20 million or 30 million robots,” he said, “it’s a big failure.”
