microagi has raised $55 million in seed funding to expand Atlas, its data and deployment platform designed to help industrial companies put robots into production more quickly, safely and accurately. Hummingbird led the round, with participation from Northzone, LocalGlobe, Village Global, and redalpine.
The company described the financing as the largest seed round in German history. It comes approximately 10 months after microagi was founded by former Formula 1 engineers from Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG Petronas.
microagi plans to use the funding to deploy Atlas across large industrial organizations, expand its engineering and research teams, and support additional robotics projects in European and international manufacturing facilities.
The company is focused on bridging the gap between robots that perform well in controlled demonstrations and machines that can reliably complete production tasks in operating factories.
Industrial robots may achieve most of a task during an initial deployment but struggle with unusual materials, changing environments, equipment variations, and other edge cases encountered during daily production.
microagi said the final improvements required for reliable commercial deployment depend heavily on data collected from each customer’s actual operations.
Atlas captures this information inside live production environments using dedicated recording hardware and a secure data platform designed to preserve training quality and protect sensitive factory information.
The platform then expands the collected information through simulation, creating additional scenarios that can be used to train and evaluate robotic systems.
microagi fine-tunes available AI models for the specific tasks, conditions and operational requirements of each factory.
The company’s forward-deployed engineers then work with customers and technology partners to install the systems, evaluate performance and continuously improve the robots using newly collected production data.
microagi’s partners include NVIDIA and Unitree, providing the company with access to AI computing, robotics and broader physical automation capabilities.
Atlas is designed to be independent of any single robot manufacturer or AI model provider.
This hardware- and model-agnostic approach allows industrial customers to choose equipment and software based on performance rather than becoming dependent on one vendor’s technology roadmap or supply chain.
microagi positions Atlas as a neutral layer connecting a manufacturer’s existing infrastructure, robotic equipment and frontier AI models.
The platform creates a continuous training loop in which robots learn from real factory operations, receive updated models and return to the production line with improved capabilities.
As more operational data becomes available, the system is intended to handle a broader range of edge cases and deliver more consistent performance.
For manufacturers, reliable robotic deployment can help reduce per-unit production costs, maintain output despite labor shortages and keep production lines operating during periods when experienced workers are unavailable.
The company is initially targeting Europe’s industrial sector, which faces pressure from rising costs, an aging workforce and increased competition from regions deploying automation more aggressively.
microagi said Europe now represents approximately 15% of global manufacturing output, compared with about 30% for China.
The company also cited nearly 40 million European Union workers over the age of 55, creating concerns that substantial amounts of operational knowledge could be lost as experienced employees retire.
Automating more industrial processes could help manufacturers preserve some of that knowledge by capturing how experienced workers complete complicated tasks and using those observations to train robotic systems.
China installed approximately 295,000 factory robots in 2024, representing 54% of worldwide installations, while Europe installed about 85,000, or 16% of the total, according to figures cited by microagi.
The company believes this difference could compound because larger robotic fleets generate more operational data, allowing their systems to learn and improve more rapidly.
Atlas is intended to help European manufacturers close that gap without requiring them to develop proprietary robotics infrastructure independently.
Rather than asking customers to select and integrate every robot, model, data system and deployment partner themselves, microagi provides a platform and engineering layer that coordinates the implementation.
The company believes this model can reduce the time between an initial robotics demonstration and reliable commercial operation.
microagi has opened its global research headquarters in Zurich, complementing its corporate headquarters in Munich and offices in London and New York.
Zurich and Munich provide access to robotics and industrial engineering talent from ETH Zurich, the Technical University of Munich and the European research operations of technology companies including Google, NVIDIA, Apple and ABB.
microagi has recruited employees from those universities as well as DeepMind, Apple and Replit.
The team includes mathematicians, physicists, rocket engineers, experienced founders, and researchers with backgrounds extending beyond conventional robotics career paths.
Founder and CEO Bercan Kilic previously worked as an engineer at Red Bull Racing.
Formula 1 requires teams to develop complex machines that perform reliably under demanding and rapidly changing conditions. microagi is applying a similar engineering discipline to robotic systems operating inside industrial environments.
The company was founded in 2025 and is positioning itself as a robotics deployment business rather than a manufacturer of one particular type of robot.
Its strategy is to use customer-specific operational data, simulation, and AI model fine-tuning to improve the machines and platforms already available in the market.
The $55 million round will support microagi as it expands Atlas and works with manufacturers seeking to automate more production tasks without becoming locked into a particular hardware supplier, model developer, or national supply chain.
KEY QUOTES:
“Industrial Europe has 12 to 18 months to build its robotic edge. We cannot afford to repeat Europe’s hesitation on AI. If you run factories in Europe, the maths is already on your desk. Your most experienced people retire this decade, and their replacements were never born.”
Bercan Kilic, Founder and CEO of microagi
“Our partners build genuinely good robots and models. Our job starts after that, on the factory floor. We put our engineers on site with each customer, and the system learns from their real operations and feeds that back into the next run, so every month we’re there they pull a little further ahead of their competitors.”
Nico Nussbaum, Chief Technology Officer of microagi
“Europe trains some of the best roboticists in the world, then watches them build companies in California. What it has lacked is ambition on a meaningful scale. microagi has gathered some of the most ambitious people we have met, kept them in Europe and aimed them at one of the hardest problems there is.”
Firat Ileri, Managing Partner at Hummingbird
