Agile Robots raised $500 million in a round led by SoftBank Group Corp. that values the Munich robot maker at $8.5 billion, giving Europe its most richly valued private robotics company.
Nvidia Corp., Hitachi Ltd. and T.Capital also took part, the company said Thursday. The round lifts Agile’s total funding to about $2 billion. It is smaller than the roughly $800 million SoftBank was said to be discussing earlier this year, but the price clears the approximately $7 billion valuation that German rival Neura Robotics reached in June with a $1.4 billion round.
From pilots to production
Founded in 2018 by researchers from the German Aerospace Center, Agile makes humanoid robots, robotic arms, mobile robots and the software that runs them, and says it has installed more than 20,000 systems worldwide. It recently opened a humanoid factory near Munich and expects to build about 2,000 units this year, with output that could double or triple in 2027. Its newest machines are being tested by manufacturers including Volkswagen’s Audi, and it sells a smaller robot of about 40 kilograms to universities and labs, where deployments generate training data.
The money will pay for expansion in the U.S. and other markets and for more manufacturing capacity in Germany. Chief Executive Zhaopeng Chen has said the funding also puts the company in a better position to consider a future stock listing.
SoftBank’s robotics bet
For SoftBank, the investment is a return to familiar ground. It led Agile’s $220 million Series C in 2021, which made the company Germany’s first robotics startup valued at more than $1 billion. Masayoshi Son has put robotics at the center of SoftBank’s AI strategy, though not without setbacks: Chinese regulators blocked its planned $5.4 billion purchase of ABB’s robotics arm, which has a large plant in Shanghai, a setback that has pushed the two sides toward a carve-out.
The round adds to a run of large checks for companies building physical AI, from Bedrock Robotics’ $600 million raise last month to this week’s funding for infrastructure makers. The test for Agile is whether it can turn factory capacity into thousands of robots doing paid work.
