TL;DR
Barcelona’s THEKER raised €73M led by CRV with Samsung and LVMH for AI-native factory robots. It’s Samsung and LVMH’s first Spanish startup investment.
THEKER, the Barcelona-based AI robotics company, has raised €73 million ($85 million) in a Series A to scale its generalist factory robots across industrial production environments. The round was led by CRV, with participation from Samsung, LVMH, Cathay Innovation, 20VC, Henkel Ventures, Korelya, and Bright Pixel Capital. It marks Samsung’s first-ever investment in a Spanish company, LVMH’s first bet on the Spanish startup ecosystem, and CRV’s first investment in Spain.
The round comes less than a year after THEKER closed Spain’s largest-ever seed round at €18 million. The speed from seed to Series A reflects what the company calls real commercial deployment momentum, not just lab demos.
“We didn’t build THEKER to run pilots,” said co-founder Carla Gómez Cano. “We built it to ship robots that work the day they arrive and continue improving every day after.”
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THEKER’s pitch is a new category of industrial robot: AI-native, generalist machines that adapt in real time to changing environments, mixed SKUs, irregular shapes, and operational variability without manual reprogramming. Unlike traditional industrial robots that are rigid and costly to reconfigure, THEKER says its systems deploy in days and continuously learn in production.
The robots are already operating inside live production environments across Europe, targeting manufacturing, logistics, and retail. The company says they help operators increase throughput, reduce downtime, and address persistent labour shortages.
Founded by Gómez Cano and Jiaqiang Ye Zhu, THEKER integrates advanced vision, control systems, and large language models into robots that operate without pre-programmed instructions. The funding will go toward deepening its proprietary AI and robotics stack and expanding the team across software, electronics, mechanical engineering, and deployments.
“What Carla, Jiaqiang and the team have built is exceptionally rare, a deeply technical platform paired with real commercial deployment momentum,” said Reid Christian, general partner at CRV. “We believe THEKER has the potential to become one of the defining robotics companies of this generation.”
The raise sits alongside a wave of European robotics funding in 2026. Germany’s RobCo closed €100 million for modular AI-driven manufacturing systems. Stuttgart-based Sereact raised €93 million to scale its physical AI platform into the US. NEURA Robotics raised up to $1.4 billion in the largest full-stack robotics round ever. THEKER’s round is smaller but carries a distinct signal: Samsung and LVMH, two of the world’s largest industrial and luxury conglomerates, are making their first Spanish startup bets on a robotics company, not a software one.
The gap between research demonstrations and robots that work reliably in real factories is where most robotics companies stall. THEKER claims to have crossed it. Whether the robots perform as advertised at scale, across industries and geographies, is the question the €73 million is designed to answer. Factory trials in Germany by Siemens and Nvidia have shown that industrial deployment is possible. THEKER is betting Barcelona can lead it.
