Funding
Agile Robots raises $500 million in a SoftBank-led round at an $8.5 billion valuation
Agile Robots, the Munich robotics company that builds humanoid and mobile robots as well as robot arms and hands, said on 12 November that it has closed a $500 million Series F round at a valuation of $8.5 billion. According to the company's announcement, SoftBank Group led the round, NVIDIA, Hitachi, Hitachi Ventures and T.Capital also took part, and the money brings its total funding to about $2 billion. Tech.eu reported the same figures.
The company said it will use the money to grow in the United States, add production capacity, including in Germany, and speed up work on new robot applications. Earlier this year Agile Robots opened a production site in Fürstenfeldbruck near Munich that it says can turn out up to 10,000 humanoid robots a year, on legs or wheels.
Agile Robots was founded in 2018 as a spin-off from the German Aerospace Center (DLR). It says it has installed more than 20,000 industrial robotics solutions for customers in automotive, consumer electronics, logistics and other sectors, employs more than 2,000 research and development specialists, and holds more than 650 patents. Its group includes Franka Robotics, BÄR Automation, idealworks and Krause Automation, which it recently bought from thyssenkrupp, the company said.
In the announcement, founder and chief executive Zhaopeng Chen described physical AI as a shift that will change how goods are made, built and moved, and said the round lets the company expand internationally faster. Dennis Chang, a managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, said the investor backs Agile Robots because it combines deep robotics expertise with the ability to deliver at industrial scale.
HumanoidBeat has previously covered Agile Robots' humanoid work, including Audi's proof of concept with its mobile humanoids for parts sequencing and the Agile ONE SN reference humanoid it unveiled alongside NVIDIA's Isaac update.