Humanoids aren’t quite ready to replace factory workers, but the industry can’t wait. Faced with labor shortages, manufacturers have shown growing interest in startups that promise faster automation without the usual tradeoffs.

That’s the bet behind Theker, an AI robotics startup that aims to go beyond robots trained for a single task. “If you always have to put the same cookie in the same box, that works perfectly, but most processes aren’t like that,” co-founder Carla Gómez Cano told TechCrunch.

Theker is designed for that messier reality. Unlike humanoid robots designed around a fixed form — think Boston Dynamics — Theker’s machines are built to be reconfigured. Their hands, arms, and overall form can be swapped out or resized depending on the task, whether that’s sorting packages, packing clothing, or handling bottles and cans in a warehouse.

That Inditex, Zara’s parent company, signed on as an early backer is a signal of where Theker’s ambitions start, not where they end. The company’s broader goal is to move beyond retail into heavier industrial settings like manufacturing, where the complexity and scale of manual tasks is even greater.

This generalist ambition has helped cement Theker’s status as one of Europe’s hot startups to watch — and raise capital accordingly. The Barcelona-based startup has just raised $85 million in what it’s calling “Europe’s largest ever robotics Series A.” (We haven’t found a larger one in our records, either.)

Less than a year after a record seed round, this Series A was led by American VC firm CRV and backed by a mix of traditional and strategic investors, including Samsung and Aglaé Ventures, the investment vehicle tied to LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault.

Gómez Cano said Samsung is not a client yet but that the two are in advanced discussions. Theker would welcome having the Korean company as a customer, supplier, and investor simultaneously — a trifecta that would give the startup both revenue and credibility in manufacturing at scale.

She also noted that she and co-founder Jiaqiang Ye Zhu “didn’t build Theker to run pilots,” so the team skips innovation departments entirely and goes straight to logistics or operations, where deals are real and timelines are shorter.

To demonstrate that the company can actually deliver on that, Theker has a showroom in central Barcelona, and plans to open others as it expands across Europe, the U.S. and Asia. It will also grow its headcount across tech, deployment, and sales.  

“We already received 15,000 job applications and have to filter like crazy,” Gómez Cano said. She estimated that the team could grow from dozens to up to 120 people by the end of the year, then caught herself: “I am saying that, but I also said that we’d raise $30 or $40 million!” 

That Theker managed to raise twice its target also reinforces the startup’s conviction in keeping its HQ in Barcelona, a growing robotics hub, and in Europe’s tech ecosystem more broadly. “It has never been a barrier to acceleration for us, so we are making the most of it,” Gómez Cano said.

Take a moment to think about how many things in your home are now automated. Your robotic vacuum cleans the floors. The temperature on your thermostat changes before you even arrive home. The camera by your front door recognizes people arriving. 

Now go outside. You will find that your lawn is still waiting for you to take out a gas-powered mower and mow it every Saturday. Indoor smart home technology is relatively mature, but the moment you step outside, things get more complicated. This gap has been a persistent challenge for the smart home industry. 

Why the yard got left behind 

There are good reasons outdoor automation took longer. Indoors, the problems are bounded: walls, flat floors, and predictable furniture. A robot vacuum maps the living room and gets to work. Outside, it’s not so simple. Terrain changes. Grass grows unevenly. There are trees, slopes, flower beds, patio chairs that get moved every weekend, garden hoses left out, kids’ toys scattered across the lawn. That’s all before considering the weather. And unlike a floor, a yard doesn’t always have walls or fences to define its edges. 

That last point is responsible for the biggest source of friction with early robotic lawn mowers. Most required homeowners to install a boundary wire around the perimeter of their yard. It involved burying or staking a physical wire into the ground to tell the mower where to stop. This worked, technically. But it was tedious to set up and easy to damage, making it a real barrier to the kind of effortless experience people have come to expect from indoor smart home devices. 

The alternative to a boundary wire was to install an RTK base station, which involved mounting an antenna and relying on GPS to guide the mower. This resolved the issues with wire installation, but could result in poor performance under dense foliage or next to fences and buildings. 

The tech that’s changing the math 

Aware of these hurdles, manufacturers have brought a new crop of robot mowers to market. The Sunseeker S4 is one of them. Among its peers, it has a notable feature: there is no boundary wire to bury and no RTK base-station antenna to mount on a roofline or pole. The experience of setting up the S4 more closely resembles setting up a new robot vacuum, without the trench-digging or antenna-mounting steps required by some earlier systems. The S4 achieves this by using its onboard sensors to understand the yard directly. Its AllSense Vision AI and 3D LiDAR work together to build a live picture of the mower’s surroundings, helping it identify common backyard obstacles and navigate messy, lived-in yards. 

However, these capabilities come with some constraints. Importantly, the S4 is not compatible with St. Augustine or Zoysia lawns. The remaining limitations are relatively narrow. The Sunseeker S4 can maintain yards up to 0.25 acres, can handle slopes up to 42% (22°), and can process up to 100 different zones across 5 maps, meaning a single unit can tackle split front and back yards. Many suburban lawns fall within these criteria. Full compatibility, pricing, and availability information is available through Sunseeker’s official channels.  

​What using it looks like 

Setup happens via the app. You create your mowing zones and set a schedule. Compared to previous generations, setup is notably shorter and simpler. No digging trenches. No staking boundary wires. No roofline RTK antenna setup. 

Once it’s running, the S4 uses its LiDAR and Vision AI to detect and attempt to navigate safely around common yard objects such as toys, pets, outdoor furniture, and garden features. It mows on a regular schedule, which is better for the grass: frequent light cuts are healthier than the scalp-and-recover cycle that many homeowners default to when the mower finally comes out on Sunday afternoon.  

The whole experience reflects how the category is evolving. The user sets it up, checks in through the app when they want to, and otherwise stops thinking about mowing. 

The robot vacuum parallel 

The comparison is hard to avoid. Ten years ago, robotic vacuum cleaners were an innovation. At first, most of them weren’t very practical. Early models randomly bounced off every object in the home, doing more to entertain than to save your labor. But over time, they got better. Setup became easier. Object detection improved drastically. Precise mapping became feasible. Eventually, robot vacuums transitioned from novelties to realistic replacements for your vacuum cleaner.  

Robotic lawn mowers appear to be moving towards a similar threshold. The category of AI lawn mowers has progressed from cumbersome, installation-heavy gadgets to practical outdoor smart home appliances. The Sunseeker S4 is one example of this shift. A 3D LiDAR robotic mower that does not require setting boundaries using a perimeter wire and can navigate a “real” yard is a completely different type of product than those available within the category five years ago. 

Are robot mowers ready for prime time? 

The change in approach among robot mower manufacturers is good news for smart home users who are eager to automate their lawn care. The initial setup overhead and friction are steadily being reduced compared to previous generations. 

For prospective users with compatible yards under 0.25 acres, the options for robot mowers that don’t require wire or RTK station installation are growing. If you’ve been considering a robot mower but have been hesitant due to the challenges, the barrier to entry is now lower than before.

However, the limitations may still be too narrow for some users. A mower like the S4 is not going to replace a riding lawn mower for large lawns of premium grass like St. Augustine, nor will it fare well with steep or otherwise extreme terrain. It may still be some time before the market sees equipment capable of addressing these challenges.  

More information about the S4 and Sunseeker’s full lineup of robot mowers is available on Sunseeker’s official website and its Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube channels.  

Disclaimer: Pricing and availability are accurate at the time of publication but may change. Prices may fluctuate during major retail events such as Prime Day. Please check the retailer’s website for the most up-to-date pricing and promotions. 

Digital Trends partners with external contributors. All contributor content is reviewed by the Digital Trends editorial staff.

A San Francisco Airbnb host is suing The Bot Company, the $2 billion robotics startup founded by ex-Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, for allegedly using his home as a secret robot testing lab. Sean Donovan claims workers booked his Portola neighbourhood property under false pretences in April, posing as remote workers from Thailand. He is seeking $12,383 in damages.

What Donovan found was not a group of digital nomads. Using his outdoor Ring camera, he counted more than 30 people entering and leaving the house over 11 nights. He overheard some of them discussing their “shifts,” he told SFGate.

When Donovan stopped by to take out the trash, he found bundles of wires leading inside. He followed them and discovered a six-foot robot he described as looking like a “borg” from Star Trek, or a giant “Roomba with treads.” The Bot Company builds household chore robots but has shared almost nothing about its prototypes publicly.

The damage was extensive. A 70-year-old family dining table was scratched and water-marked. A Franciscan pottery set went missing. A bathroom tile was chipped, a coffee table banged up, and a broken mug had its handle glued back on. An entire shoe rack disappeared. “They came in and put everything back in a new place,” Donovan told SFGate. “Silverware in a new drawer or a different room.”

Vogt co-founded The Bot Company in 2024 with Paril Jain, the former head of Tesla’s AI division. The startup has raised more than $300 million, including a $150 million round led by Greenoaks. It is valued at approximately $2 billion, despite having revealed almost nothing about what it is building.

Vogt’s previous venture did not end well. He was CEO of Cruise, GM’s robotaxi division, which was shut down in 2024 after a series of safety incidents. GM absorbed the technical team and redirected autonomous driving work toward personal vehicles.

There is a legitimate reason to test household robots in real homes rather than sanitised labs. Domestic environments are cluttered, unpredictable, and full of objects that break. But doing it without the property owner’s consent, under a false identity, crosses a line. The lawsuit alleges unauthorised commercial R&D activity, including robotic prototype testing and filming for commercial purposes.

Other robotics companies testing in real-world environments have faced similar scrutiny. Robotaxi operators have been criticised for using public roads as de facto test tracks. The Bot Company appears to have applied the same logic to someone’s living room, and the result was a trashed house and a rare, accidental glimpse at a prototype the company would rather have kept secret.

A team of researchers at Georgia Tech has developed a new smartphone-based system that could dramatically simplify how people interact with robots. Called COBALT, the platform allows users with little to no computing experience to remotely control robot arms from virtually anywhere in the world using just a phone and an internet connection.

The project, developed at Georgia Tech’s People, AI & Robotics (PAIR) Lab, transforms smartphones into motion controllers for robotic arms. Users simply move their phones in different directions, and the robot mirrors those movements in real time. Basic tasks such as grabbing, moving, and releasing objects can be performed through simple on-screen controls, making the experience feel more like playing a mobile game than operating industrial machinery.

Ayush Agarwal, a Ph.D. student in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing who leads the COBALT research team, said the system was intentionally designed to make robotics accessible to beginners rather than experts. During testing, participants from countries including India, Indonesia, and Pakistan remotely controlled robot arms located inside Georgia Tech’s lab despite having no prior robotics experience.

Researchers believe crowdsourcing could shape the future of robotics

The broader goal behind COBALT extends beyond convenience. Researchers believe the platform could solve one of robotics’ biggest challenges: collecting enough real-world training data to improve AI-powered robotic systems.

Modern robots require enormous amounts of policy training data to learn how to perform physical tasks reliably. According to Assistant Professor Animesh Garg, who directs the PAIR Lab, simulation alone is not enough to train robots for large-scale deployment. Instead, researchers envision a crowdsourced network where millions of smartphone users passively contribute operational data by remotely interacting with robots.

Garg compared the idea to tapping into the nearly five billion smartphone users worldwide. By lowering the barrier to entry, the team hopes to create a scalable global system capable of accelerating robotic learning and automation.

The technology could also have major educational implications. Georgia Tech researchers recently demonstrated COBALT to students from Midtown High School in Atlanta, allowing them to remotely operate robot arms using smartphones. The simplicity of the interface could make robotics education more accessible in classrooms without expensive equipment or specialized hardware.

A future “gig economy” for robots may not be far away

The researchers also believe COBALT could eventually support entirely new forms of remote work. Garg described the possibility of a robot-powered gig economy where people remotely operate assistive robots in homes, warehouses, or factories from anywhere in the world.

In practical terms, that could mean a factory robot autonomously handles most tasks but requests human assistance when it encounters a difficult situation. Instead of requiring on-site workers, remote operators could briefly take control through their phones before handing the operation back to the AI system.

Agarwal said user studies showed smartphones were preferred over VR headsets, keyboards, or traditional controllers because they felt more intuitive while still providing high-quality control data. The system also minimizes latency by using WebRTC technology, similar to platforms like Zoom and Google Meet, ensuring that robot movements and live video streams remain responsive even across long distances.

The research paper on COBALT is being presented this week at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Vienna, where the team is showcasing not just the technology itself, but the large-scale remote operation network built around it.

A military research institute demonstrated three versions of a four-legged robot, one of them armed, for possible duty on remote outposts the coast guard struggles to staff.

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Taiwan’s main weapons-development institute put three robot dogs through their paces on Monday, presenting them as a possible answer to a hard problem: how to keep watch over tiny, far-flung islands in the South China Sea without sending many more people to live on them.

The National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, which is military-owned, demonstrated three versions of a four-legged robot built by Ghost Robotics, a US supplier of quadruped machines, according to Reuters.

The institute has fitted its own equipment to the robots for three roles: reconnaissance, surveillance, and firepower. The last of those carries a gun mounted on its back, which is the detail that tends to draw the eye, and the one that places these machines in the contested territory between a patrol tool and a weapon.

Ghost Robotics, unlike some rivals, has not barred the weaponisation of its quadrupeds, which is part of why its machines have found their way into military programmes that Boston Dynamics’ terms would not permit. Taiwan’s marines have said there is a pressing need for robots that can handle beach and coastline patrols and inspections in the Spratlys and the Pratas, the two island groups at issue.

Geography explains the interest. Taiwan controls Itu Aba, also called Taiping, the largest natural island in the Spratlys, and it holds the Pratas, which sit at the northern end of the South China Sea and are guarded in peacetime by the coast guard rather than the military. Both are small, remote, and expensive to keep manned.

A robot that can walk a perimeter in the heat without rotation, rest, or a supply chain for anything but power is, on paper, well suited to exactly that kind of posting.

The backdrop is a steadily tenser maritime standoff. Taiwan has complained of a rising number of Chinese coast guard patrols, and even drones, near the Pratas, part of Beijing’s broader pressure campaign against an island it claims as its own.

Unmanned systems have become a feature of that contest on both sides; Chinese forces have themselves trialled armed robot dogs and small drones in amphibious exercises near Taiwan over the past year.

For now this is a demonstration, not a deployment. Reuters reported that the military has signalled a requirement for the robots but has not placed a formal order, so the timeline, the numbers, and whether the armed variant ever reaches an actual beach all remain open.

Robotic quadrupeds have been edging into military service elsewhere, from the French Army’s trials of Boston Dynamics’ Spot to a wave of European battlefield-robot funding. Taiwan’s version of the idea now has a stage, a gun, and a set of islands it was built with in mind. What it does not yet have is an order.