"Existing investors including Sequoia, Lightspeed, Greenfield, Kindred, Lingotto and Promus Ventures participated alongside new backers Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective."
No, not really. That's info the OP could easily Google. The answer to their actual question can only be provided by someone with inside knowledge or access to paywalled trade publications.
I'm not familiar with German law / investing, but if they're public here in the US, they have to disclose amounts to investors. If they're not on the stock market, then yeah, unless German law mandates it, we may never know.
I'm not sure if the following has any point, really.
First, my father worked as an industrial mechanic in an amazon distribution hub. But he couldn't touch any of the automation. Amazon would bring in German contractors for months at a time to work on the robots, conveyor belts, automation hardware. They made 2.5-3x my father, had 6 weeks vacation, didn't pay for lodging in the US. To me, Amazon's idea of US jobs were the backbreaking labor 'pickers' and 'sorters'.
Second, half my professional career has been in office/factory configurations. Where the engineering offices are glued onto some factory. We're HEAVILY invested in automation. The factory workers are barebones crew designated by union minimums. We have a team of 2-5 people (really, 2 engineers, 3 technicians) who design, build, program, and maintain automated stations. Ranging from a robotic arm picking different components in the correct amounts and putting them in a box, heavy forklift-like robots moving product around, and robotic arms performing some manufacturing task.
What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
Why haven't we hired like 3 junior people to apprentice with the senior guys? They make machines that make money! The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
Maybe I'm wayyyy off the mark, but investing in "US Manufacturing" by importing automation (whether it's from the EU or Asia or anywhere else) probably won't end well and seems like marketing.
> The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
These are shitty job tbh. Friend of a friend worked on designing and testing windscreen wiper motors in Poland. Company did a round of layoffs and there are zero jobs in the country. There is one job in US - nobody will sponsor a visa. He doesn't know the language to work in Asia.
This is basically how the rest of the world feels with US tech giants.
It's not necessarily a bad thing if there's balance to it. Maybe it's OK if Germans are great at industrial automation and Americans are great at writing word processors. But I'm not sure there's a nice balance to it. Especially if you're in a developing country which is good at neither of those things.
The universal healthcare is hard to quantify - because most decent companies include health insurance in the US and the quality of the public healthcare provision in Europe can be quite patchy (i.e. location-dependent)
Remember that you are comparing gross salaries too, and taxes are much higher in Germany so the engineer ends up with much less take-home pay.
You can't trust a quick google search nowadays for anything. I work in Germany. Any engineer making that much money has to be a senior at a higher position with loads of responsibilities (which means the average is nowhere near), plus living in a city that is considered expensive. Also, half that money goes to taxes. (someone has to pay for the universal healthcare afterall)
Why not? Huge companies like Schlumberger work on a similar model. I mean these are not AI businesses (yet) but commercially the model is the same: develop gear in house and rent it out together with the specialists who operate it.
Most AI is not subscription but pay-per-use (I guess for an industrial robot that would mean pay per action the robot does), and that is a big part of why everybody piles into AI.
Huh? I thought that was their entire selling point. That you can have a factory that needs retooling and instead of having to carefully plan and buy robots yourself, you can hire these guys instead.
I don't know enough about airline finance to understand if this is a simplification or not. Are engine users really billed by the kilonewton-hour or by something simpler like a service hour? It seems like kN-h would be a hard thing to meter to everyone's satisfaction and some simpler proxy would do just as well.
"Under TotalCare, an airline pays Rolls-Royce a fixed rate per engine flying hour." [0] Not quite kN-h indeed. But the idea is similar (and more simple to implement, I suppose): you don't really own the engine, you pay for what you use.
If you can get him in time, plus are willing to risk unknown quality of his work. Reliable professionals tend to be booked long in advance, at least where I live.
I'm not sure if I would consider tech demos like this state of the art. They look impressive and they do show promise but there's a huge gap between an impressive demo and a usable product. This goes for Google Gemini as well.
A couple decades ago, in Brazil, the parking lot used next to a popular Microsoft training center was called South Park. The contact e-mail was "cartman@southpark.com.br".
Coming right up: Belgian Hybrid shower curtain and defense startup Aperture Science raises 780M Euros, while biotech unicorn Umbrella in on the verge of coming out of stealth and releasing a vaccine for cancer.
Nothing about Europe's policy has been realistic for decades now. The whole of Europe is a vassal of the US and exists at the mercy of the Americans. If they withdraw support Europe is no longer viable.
If Europe was not a vassal of the US why do we refuse to stand on their own legs? Why is almost every decision of ours predicated on US participation? Europe will give guaruntees to Ukraine but only if USA puts boots on the ground. Europe will secure the Hormuz straight but only once USA has secured it. It's pathetic and embarrassing.
Europe shut down more than 20 Diesel refineries in the past 20 years and then we cry that Diesel is too expensive and blame the Americans. Pathetic.
The comments here are just another reminder of how US-centric HN has become. Whenever there's positive news from Germany or elsewhere in Europe, people are quick to dismiss it. But the moment there's negative news, everyone jumps on the bandwagon to bash it.
There was an interesting study showing that while social mobility is generally greater in Europe than in the US, the European tendency to underestimate vs American to overestimate it, results in broad agreement that social mobility is in fact greater in the US.
Poking holes in every new idea is a pan-European pastime - it's how people in this region of the world managed to survive despite exhausting its resources.
The market is definitely there, and Kuka was sold for $4 billion, but whenever venture capitalist are involved, the hype machine is activated and it's difficult to see through the smoke and mirrors.
I just found out about them. To me it seems their core product is "boring" industrial robots with some AI fluff on top, which imho is smart because you can capaitalize on the hype without having it be pivotal to their entire business model. What I find interesting is the robot-as-a-service model.
Definitely not.
I have laundry that I hang. Everything else goes unfolded into sorted bins.
Of course it drives my wife crazy, and if she takes my laundry out of the dryer, she folds it. What drives her more crazy is that I proceed to just dump it in the bins.
I assume you got a spouse or parent do all the laundry for you? I’m not sure you realize how spoiled you sound.
Seriously a laundry folding robot excites me much more than a CLI that can generate code. I enjoy generating code myself! I don’t enjoy laundry. Total killer app.
At the risk of making yet another wrong assumption, that sounds like you don’t have a family?
Fwiw laundry takes a pretty significant chunk out of my weekend. I wouldn't spend “thousands of dollars” to reduce it but at around the price of a new phone I’m totally in the market.
I understand why humans get fixated on the nominal threshold of a large, round number like $1B.
But the thing about private market valuations is that you can't know if investors are right ex ante, so it's helpful to discount.
A $1B valuation sort of just means you now effectively "owe it" to shareholders, and you're now 100% incentivized to deliver that to them in some form, instead of being fully incentivized to deliver on your true vision to your customer.
When done well, private diligence can help uncover blind spots and fund company growth in key areas at the service of that true vision.
When done poorly because of FOMO over AI, robotics, or the latest hype, it can turn into preemptive enshittification.
No, we're quite happy doing that. On behalf of the German people I wish to thank everyone involved for the thoughtful suggestions and intelligent way to approach a possibly interesting topic though. I can tell your hearts and minds are in the right place.
"Existing investors including Sequoia, Lightspeed, Greenfield, Kindred, Lingotto and Promus Ventures participated alongside new backers Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective."
What share of the investor money is from USA?
I don’t know what the point is that you’re making.
I read it as confirmation that there is apparently no shortage of investor money in Europe, since US investors are willing and able to invest here.
Sequoia, Lightspeed, and Promus are American. Greenfield is Israeli, and Kindred Capital is British.
Don't know about Lingotto. Looks Italian.
Cherry Ventures is the only German investor. ETC is EU.
Technically, this doesn't answer the question, which was about investment money, not about the investment firms.
Still helps get you to a more accurate answer to know which firms investments to scrutinize no?
No, not really. That's info the OP could easily Google. The answer to their actual question can only be provided by someone with inside knowledge or access to paywalled trade publications.
I'm not familiar with German law / investing, but if they're public here in the US, they have to disclose amounts to investors. If they're not on the stock market, then yeah, unless German law mandates it, we may never know.
I'm not sure if the following has any point, really.
First, my father worked as an industrial mechanic in an amazon distribution hub. But he couldn't touch any of the automation. Amazon would bring in German contractors for months at a time to work on the robots, conveyor belts, automation hardware. They made 2.5-3x my father, had 6 weeks vacation, didn't pay for lodging in the US. To me, Amazon's idea of US jobs were the backbreaking labor 'pickers' and 'sorters'.
Second, half my professional career has been in office/factory configurations. Where the engineering offices are glued onto some factory. We're HEAVILY invested in automation. The factory workers are barebones crew designated by union minimums. We have a team of 2-5 people (really, 2 engineers, 3 technicians) who design, build, program, and maintain automated stations. Ranging from a robotic arm picking different components in the correct amounts and putting them in a box, heavy forklift-like robots moving product around, and robotic arms performing some manufacturing task.
What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
Why haven't we hired like 3 junior people to apprentice with the senior guys? They make machines that make money! The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
Maybe I'm wayyyy off the mark, but investing in "US Manufacturing" by importing automation (whether it's from the EU or Asia or anywhere else) probably won't end well and seems like marketing.
> The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
These are shitty job tbh. Friend of a friend worked on designing and testing windscreen wiper motors in Poland. Company did a round of layoffs and there are zero jobs in the country. There is one job in US - nobody will sponsor a visa. He doesn't know the language to work in Asia.
He switched to software.
This is basically how the rest of the world feels with US tech giants.
It's not necessarily a bad thing if there's balance to it. Maybe it's OK if Germans are great at industrial automation and Americans are great at writing word processors. But I'm not sure there's a nice balance to it. Especially if you're in a developing country which is good at neither of those things.
Engineering salaries in the EU are far lower than in the US though.
They probably just used the Germans because they are cheaper.
Based on what data? A quick google search says the average automation engineer in Germany makes 90k euro to $107k in the US.
And the German has universal healthcare, clocks out at 5 and can’t be bothered, and gets real vacation time.
https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/automation-engineer/
Median automation engineer in Germany made 78 840 € in 2025, according to government statistics
https://web.arbeitsagentur.de/entgeltatlas/beruf/59351
The vacation time is genuinely better, yeah.
The universal healthcare is hard to quantify - because most decent companies include health insurance in the US and the quality of the public healthcare provision in Europe can be quite patchy (i.e. location-dependent)
Remember that you are comparing gross salaries too, and taxes are much higher in Germany so the engineer ends up with much less take-home pay.
You can't trust a quick google search nowadays for anything. I work in Germany. Any engineer making that much money has to be a senior at a higher position with loads of responsibilities (which means the average is nowhere near), plus living in a city that is considered expensive. Also, half that money goes to taxes. (someone has to pay for the universal healthcare afterall)
Maybe the engineer makes 90K, but there are still thousands in social contributions. Can be up to 15K.
> The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
Lol. Lmao, even.
More like in turkey amirite lol
Ain't that a kick in the head?
Ain't that a hole in the boat!
> Robotics-as-a-Service model
Oof. Amazed that venture-backed robotics companies are still interested in making this work.
Why not? Huge companies like Schlumberger work on a similar model. I mean these are not AI businesses (yet) but commercially the model is the same: develop gear in house and rent it out together with the specialists who operate it.
Most AI is not subscription but pay-per-use (I guess for an industrial robot that would mean pay per action the robot does), and that is a big part of why everybody piles into AI.
Huh? I thought that was their entire selling point. That you can have a factory that needs retooling and instead of having to carefully plan and buy robots yourself, you can hire these guys instead.
Imagine a robot bricklayer. Some big construction companies may buy them outright, but for smaller projects, it makes sense to simply rent them.
aaS means you don't even rent them, you just pay someone to come and lay a certain number of bricks by any means necessary.
Airplane engine manufacturers retain ownership of their engines, and sell kilonewton-hours to airlines.
I don't know enough about airline finance to understand if this is a simplification or not. Are engine users really billed by the kilonewton-hour or by something simpler like a service hour? It seems like kN-h would be a hard thing to meter to everyone's satisfaction and some simpler proxy would do just as well.
"Under TotalCare, an airline pays Rolls-Royce a fixed rate per engine flying hour." [0] Not quite kN-h indeed. But the idea is similar (and more simple to implement, I suppose): you don't really own the engine, you pay for what you use.
[0] https://www.meritshot.com/rolls-royce-case-study
EDIT: wording
Those have existed for quite a while now. For smaller projects it is cheaper to get a human.
If you can get him in time, plus are willing to risk unknown quality of his work. Reliable professionals tend to be booked long in advance, at least where I live.
Cheaper, for now.
What is the SOTA in AI for robotics today? Is there much progress? Or is everybody too much focused on the LLMs now?
Why do you think it is separated?
https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/
And not sure what RobCo is doing exactly, but LLMs are probably part of it as well.
Some further reading on the LLM-and-robotics aspect in addition to your link:
https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen-robotsuite
https://drivingbench.com/
I'm not sure if I would consider tech demos like this state of the art. They look impressive and they do show promise but there's a huge gap between an impressive demo and a usable product. This goes for Google Gemini as well.
Ehm, I didn't say they needed to be separated :)
The link looks great, but was hoping for more research-oriented details.
what is it with people choosing evil corpo names
Indeed. The name was well established in the popular Fallout game series before this company was founded.
I guess in this category, those guys are unbeatable: https://www.mordorintelligence.com/
The fact a defence company is also called Stark is quite amusing, if not for the deadly weapons.
Reminds me of the first time I heard about the "Palantir" company...
Edit : typo
Evil often wins and makes a lot of money. Also effective if your target audience is evil billionaires with brain rot.
this one doesn't sound that evil though? Just a simple portmanteau that may not sound as stupid in German?
Effective in this attention economy.
Eyerolling to anyone with half a brain.
But maybe most people don't have half a brain.
A couple decades ago, in Brazil, the parking lot used next to a popular Microsoft training center was called South Park. The contact e-mail was "cartman@southpark.com.br".
Coming right up: Belgian Hybrid shower curtain and defense startup Aperture Science raises 780M Euros, while biotech unicorn Umbrella in on the verge of coming out of stealth and releasing a vaccine for cancer.
Isn't the $1B unicorn number from like 2015? I feel like that's a pretty typical series A/B valuation at this point.
There are under 2k private unicorns so it’s still a worthwhile metric. $1B is a proper business.
The next level up of decacorn is sub 100 so if we only tracked that it’d be a bit limited.
>"The next level up of decacorn is sub 100 so if we only tracked that it’d be a bit limited."
That's kind of the point though, isn't it?
For Silicon Valley, maybe. But this is Europe, where things are still rooted in reality.
Nothing about Europe's policy has been realistic for decades now. The whole of Europe is a vassal of the US and exists at the mercy of the Americans. If they withdraw support Europe is no longer viable.
must be sarcasm. must be
If Europe was not a vassal of the US why do we refuse to stand on their own legs? Why is almost every decision of ours predicated on US participation? Europe will give guaruntees to Ukraine but only if USA puts boots on the ground. Europe will secure the Hormuz straight but only once USA has secured it. It's pathetic and embarrassing.
Europe shut down more than 20 Diesel refineries in the past 20 years and then we cry that Diesel is too expensive and blame the Americans. Pathetic.
The comments here are just another reminder of how US-centric HN has become. Whenever there's positive news from Germany or elsewhere in Europe, people are quick to dismiss it. But the moment there's negative news, everyone jumps on the bandwagon to bash it.
There was an interesting study showing that while social mobility is generally greater in Europe than in the US, the European tendency to underestimate vs American to overestimate it, results in broad agreement that social mobility is in fact greater in the US.
Poking holes in every new idea is a pan-European pastime - it's how people in this region of the world managed to survive despite exhausting its resources.
Well, it seems their fastest growing market (and largest?) is in the USA.
They, per the article, have set up manufacturing there and a research lab in SF.
The co-founder has also relocated to the USA.
Much of the dismissal I think doesn’t come from a bad place - people see potential in europe, why can’t it a similar market?
Who is dismissing it?
People here work in the US tech bubble. The behavior you describe is indicative of fear.
news.ycombinator.eu
SCNR
so the website is basically called it physical AI
Cries in dystopian
Just as long as the CEO’s name isn’t Robert House, I guess
Hype for the inevitable NYSE IPO!
Capital Markets union is coming :-)
The market is definitely there, and Kuka was sold for $4 billion, but whenever venture capitalist are involved, the hype machine is activated and it's difficult to see through the smoke and mirrors.
I was expecting to be disappointed at seeing another humanoid robot that can fold laundry BS startup.
But it looks like they're trying to build something that is actually useful.
I just found out about them. To me it seems their core product is "boring" industrial robots with some AI fluff on top, which imho is smart because you can capaitalize on the hype without having it be pivotal to their entire business model. What I find interesting is the robot-as-a-service model.
folding laundry is not useful?
It would be. But it also feels like the "Can it run Crysis?" of robotics.
By the time we get robots capable of folding laundry, we'd already have solved many, many other use-cases.
Definitely not. I have laundry that I hang. Everything else goes unfolded into sorted bins. Of course it drives my wife crazy, and if she takes my laundry out of the dryer, she folds it. What drives her more crazy is that I proceed to just dump it in the bins.
Better to put the items on hangers.
I assume you got a spouse or parent do all the laundry for you? I’m not sure you realize how spoiled you sound.
Seriously a laundry folding robot excites me much more than a CLI that can generate code. I enjoy generating code myself! I don’t enjoy laundry. Total killer app.
> I assume you got a spouse or parent do all the laundry for you? I’m not sure you realize how spoiled you sound.
What a weird accusation. I do this myself, it takes like half an hour a week and is actually quite relaxing.
I'm not sure you realize how spoiled people sound who would spend thousands of dollars to replace such an insignificant inconvenience.
At the risk of making yet another wrong assumption, that sounds like you don’t have a family?
Fwiw laundry takes a pretty significant chunk out of my weekend. I wouldn't spend “thousands of dollars” to reduce it but at around the price of a new phone I’m totally in the market.
Yeah, that assumption is correct. So doing laundry for others as well wasn't really something I was considering.
I understand why humans get fixated on the nominal threshold of a large, round number like $1B.
But the thing about private market valuations is that you can't know if investors are right ex ante, so it's helpful to discount.
A $1B valuation sort of just means you now effectively "owe it" to shareholders, and you're now 100% incentivized to deliver that to them in some form, instead of being fully incentivized to deliver on your true vision to your customer.
When done well, private diligence can help uncover blind spots and fund company growth in key areas at the service of that true vision.
When done poorly because of FOMO over AI, robotics, or the latest hype, it can turn into preemptive enshittification.
Will this also be a Russian scam?
How dare you!
Germans are totally capable of their own scams (see Dieselgate or Berlin airport or ...).
Or AfD
AfD is hardly a scam. They promise nazism and they deliver it.
They are going hard with the downvotes, maybe they should be as self righteous when it comes to not committing fraud at a national level for once
No, we're quite happy doing that. On behalf of the German people I wish to thank everyone involved for the thoughtful suggestions and intelligent way to approach a possibly interesting topic though. I can tell your hearts and minds are in the right place.
The downvotes are puzzling.
What is this a reference to?
Wirecard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_scandal