German company aims to capitalize on growing demand for autonomous industrial robots
By Ben Dummett
German robotics startup RobCo has sold shares in a deal that values the company at more than $1 billion -- double the level hit earlier this year -- highlighting investor enthusiasm for physical AI systems.
The company makes autonomous industrial robots aimed at automating repetitive manual tasks like stacking pallets and weighing raw materials. Its new flagship product is a two-armed, self-learning robot called Alfie that is designed to mimic a human working on a factory floor.
RobCo said it is selling $40 million worth of shares -- most of which are being sold by employees -- to a group of new and existing investors. The sale follows a $100 million fundraising in January that valued the business at roughly $500 million.
The startup's rising valuation is emblematic of a broader bet by investors on technological advancements spurring wide adoption of robots in factories and the home. Robotics and physical AI startups raised $33.4 billion in the first half of the year, more than in all of 2025, according to data provider PitchBook.
New investors in RobCo include Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective, a fund that counts founders from Wiz -- the cybersecurity startup that Google acquired last year for $32 billion -- and payments giant Adyen among its limited partners.
Existing RobCo investors participating in the deal include venture-capital firms Sequoia and Lightspeed as well as Lingotto, a fund backed by the family behind Jeep owner Stellantis. Another is Leitmotif, an investment firm funded by Volkswagen.
RobCo was founded in 2020 by researchers from the Technical University of Munich, which is home to a robotics and machine intelligence institute. Since then, it has sold more than 1,000 robots to a range of industrial customers including German automaker BMW.
RobCo's sales pitch is that its technology can help customers offset labor shortages, cut costs and expand output. A big focus for the company is expanding in the U.S., where it now has operations in Austin and San Francisco.
Central to that effort is its new Alfie robot, which the company says can learn from its mistakes and correct them in real time.
"Alfie is our answer to automating the 80% to 90% of tasks that now require manual labor in manufacturing," said Roman Hölzl, the startup's co-founder and chief executive. Hölzl moved to San Francisco earlier this year to spearhead the company's U.S. expansion.
While traditional industrial robots are designed to repeat a specific task and need to be reprogrammed to do something different, RobCo says Alfie's embedded AI allows it to adapt to new tasks on its own.
With AI making robots smarter, more manufacturers will rely on them to overcome a lack of workers, said Luciana Lixandru, a Sequoia partner who led the firm's investment in RobCo.
"The biggest issue in manufacturing is a labor shortage," Lixandru said. "A lot of the younger generation doesn't want to do repetitive work on the factory floor, which is hard."
Governments are also working to ensure their nations aren't left behind. In January, the German government launched an initiative called AI Robotics Booster, pledging the equivalent of about $112 million to help scale and commercialize AI-based robotics.
"Developments in robotics and AI are progressing at breakneck speed worldwide," the government said when announcing its initiative. "At the same time, there is a growing concern that significant parts of value creation will take place outside of Europe in future."
RobCo's founders chose its name as a shortened version of The Robot Company -- not in homage to the fictional megacorporation in the post-apocalyptic videogame series "Fallout," though Hölzl doesn't mind if people inadvertently make the connection.
"I quite like it," Hölzl said. "Though I would have liked to have known about it before we chose the name."