Agile Robots, a robot maker based in Munich, said on Nov. 12 that it had raised $500 million at a valuation of $8.5 billion. SoftBank Group led the round, and NVIDIA, Hitachi and T.Capital were among the other investors. The company says the round brings the total it has raised to $2 billion. SoftBank has backed it before: its Vision Fund 2 led an earlier Agile Robots round, in 2021.
Agile Robots makes robot arms and hands, mobile robots and humanoid robots, robots built in a human shape, some on legs and some on wheels. It also makes the software and AI that run them, and it owns other robot companies, among them Franka Robotics, which makes robots for AI research, and Krause Automation, which it recently bought from thyssenkrupp. It calls this work physical AI, AI that senses and acts in the real world through machines such as robots and self-driving cars. The company says its customers include carmakers and consumer electronics, healthcare and service companies. It says it has installed more than 20,000 robot systems for customers in carmaking, consumer electronics, logistics and other industries since it was founded in 2018 as a spin-off from the German Aerospace Center.
The company's pitch is that its robots can take on factory work that has relied on human dexterity and judgment. On Oct. 21, Agile Robots and Audi announced a test of the robots for Audi's Ingolstadt plant. In Audi's Production Lab, where the carmaker tries out new factory technology, humanoids on mobile bases were picking parts from bins and setting them in the order needed for final assembly. Dassault Systèmes and NVIDIA, a backer in the new round, supply software to test the robots' task in a computer model of the workplace first.
Agile Robots says the new money will pay for growth in the United States, more production capacity, including in Germany, and entry into new markets. Early in 2026 it opened a factory at Fürstenfeldbruck, near Munich, which it says can build up to 10,000 humanoid robots a year, on legs or on wheels. "This funding allows us to accelerate our global expansion, strengthen our presence in key markets and build out production capacity," said Zhaopeng Chen, the company's founder and chief executive.
The company has not said how much each investor put in. It describes its 20,000 systems as industrial robots installed since 2018 and calls its mobile humanoids newly developed, and it has not said how many humanoids it has delivered, or how many the Fürstenfeldbruck site has built so far. Audi says it is exploring what the robots can do. The companies plan to put the robots into Audi's plant logistics once they have been tested in the computer model, but have not said when, or at what scale.