Newshot SoftBank leads Agile Robots' $500 million funding round, stepping up mass production of humanoid robots
IT之家 November 12 news: German robot manufacturer Agile Robots SE has completed a new funding round at a valuation of $8.5 billion (IT之家 note: about 56.829 billion yuan at current exchange rates). The round was led by SoftBank Group, giving the startup fresh capital to expand production of AI robots.
Munich-based Agile Robots said in a statement that it raised $500 million (about 3.343 billion yuan at current exchange rates) in this round, bringing total funding to about $2 billion (about 13.372 billion yuan at current exchange rates). Nvidia, Hitachi and T.Capital also participated in the round.
Agile Robots CEO 陈兆芃 (Zhaopeng Chen) has described the robotics race as a capital-intensive "war." As companies compete to develop physical AI and robotics technology, the industry is working to move products out of the testing phase and into real-world use.
Agile Robots plans to use the new funding to expand its business in the United States and other markets and to increase manufacturing capacity. The company recently opened a humanoid robot factory near Munich and said it expects to produce about 2,000 humanoid robots in 2026, with output in 2027 potentially rising to two or even three times that level.
陈兆芃 said: "We are getting closer and closer to a key turning point where humanoid robots will be more efficient than humans."
Agile Robots is currently testing some of its latest robot systems at manufacturing customers, including Volkswagen's Audi.
The company has also launched a small robot weighing about 40 kilograms, aimed mainly at universities and laboratories, for researchers to test the performance of underlying AI models in real environments.
Agile Robots hopes that by putting robots into these real-world application scenarios, it can accumulate large amounts of training data to help robots improve their capabilities and make it easier for them to learn new tasks through retraining.
SoftBank has been one of the most active investors in robotics. Group founder 孙正义 (Masayoshi Son) has positioned the robotics business as a core part of the group's AI strategy.
Agile Robots was founded in 2018 by researchers from the German Aerospace Center (DLR), and its business covers the development of humanoid robots, mobile robots, robotic arms and related control software.
陈兆芃 said that for some work tasks, humanoid robots are close to achieving higher efficiency than human labor. However, the industry still faces several technical challenges, including battery life, weight distribution and the quality of real-world training data.