Lightspeed backs RobCo — TFN

Producers world wide are scuffling with the identical drawback: factories are below stress to automate, however immediately’s robots are sometimes laborious to deploy, costly to keep up, and gradual to adapt when processes change.

Labour shortages, rising prices, and extra advanced manufacturing strains have solely widened the hole between what automation guarantees and what it delivers on the manufacturing facility flooring.

Munich-based robotics firm RobCo believes it has a solution. The corporate has raised $100 million in a Sequence C spherical to scale its autonomous industrial robotics platform and push deeper into the U.S. market.

The brand new funding spherical is co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Lingotto Innovation, the funding agency backed by Exor. Present traders Sequoia Capital, Greenfield Companions, Kindred Capital, Leitmotif, and The Friedkin Group additionally joined the spherical.

The contemporary capital can be used to increase RobCo’s Bodily AI roadmap, roll out extra robots inside actual factories, and strengthen its footprint in the US. The funds can be used to scale enterprise deployments, enhance autonomy throughout RobCo’s robotics platform, and help long-term development in each Europe and the U.S.

RobCo additionally plans to take a position additional in product improvement as its techniques be taught from extra real-world manufacturing facility knowledge over time.

“With this $100 million, we’re constructing the main AI robotics firm for manufacturing within the U.S. and Europe. Our objective is easy: automate repetitive work so folks can give attention to higher-value duties,” mentioned Roman Hölzl, founder and CEO of RobCo.

What’s RobCo constructing?

Based in 2020, RobCo develops a full-stack robotics platform that mixes {hardware} and software program right into a single system. As an alternative of counting on advanced handbook programming, RobCo’s robots be taught new duties by way of demonstrations and self-learning. This strategy permits robots to adapt extra shortly to actual manufacturing environments, the place circumstances typically change, and processes are not often good.

The platform brings collectively notion, movement planning, and studying, serving to producers spend much less time establishing automation and extra time working their core operations.

RobCo additionally positions itself as a “single pane of glass” for patrons, which means firms don’t must juggle a number of distributors for {hardware}, software program, and integration.

Increasing throughout the US

RobCo entered the U.S. market in 2025 and now operates out of San Francisco and Austin. The growth comes as American producers ramp up automation to take care of labour shortages, reshoring efforts, and rising operational complexity.

The corporate’s robots are already in use throughout totally different industrial settings, together with deployments with BMW and different industrial companies in vitality, manufacturing, and electronics.

“After main RobCo’s Sequence B, we’re excited to double down and co-lead this $100 million spherical. Our bar is exceptionally excessive, and RobCo has continued to lift the usual for what fashionable robotics can appear like in real-world manufacturing. RobCo has what it takes to construct a worldwide champion: techniques that already ship in industrial environments immediately and a platform grounded in Bodily AI that may scale throughout use circumstances and geographies. This funding helps RobCo’s growth with a give attention to the U.S. and the continued improvement of a roadmap that compounds studying and grows functionality over time,” mentioned Alexander Schmitt, Lightspeed.

Morgan Samet, Managing Companion & Co-Head of Lingotto Innovation, added: “Manufacturing is getting into a brand new section the place autonomy can be a decisive benefit. RobCo stands out as a result of it brings Bodily AI into actual manufacturing environments, combining confirmed deployment immediately with a transparent, step-by-step path towards larger autonomy – permitting studying techniques to help folks the place it issues most on the manufacturing facility flooring.”