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.”

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.

SoftBank, it seems, is not done buying robots. The Japanese group is in early talks to back a new funding round of around $800m (€700m) for Agile Robots, the Munich startup that builds robot arms, warehouse machines, and humanoids, according to Bloomberg.

SoftBank would contribute more than $300m of that total, people familiar with the discussions told the outlet, though they cautioned that the talks are at an early stage and the amounts and terms could still change.

Neither company would comment, and the round has not been independently confirmed beyond Bloomberg’s reporting, so the figures are best read as a snapshot of a negotiation rather than a done deal. What is on firmer ground is the relationship behind it.

SoftBank led Agile Robots’ $220m Series C in 2021, the round that turned the company into Germany’s first robotics unicorn, so a fresh cheque would be a return to a name already in the portfolio rather than a new acquaintance.

Agile Robots was formed in 2018 by researchers from the German Aerospace Center, the country’s space agency, and it now employs more than 3,200 people across Germany, China, and India.

It makes both the software and the hardware, which places it in the part of the robotics market investors have grown most excited about: machines that do physical work in factories, warehouses, and logistics depots, rather than chatbots that live on a screen.

That enthusiasm has money behind it. Global investment in robotics and physical AI reached $27.6bn in 2025, according to PitchBook, more than double the previous year’s total, as investors looked for ways to put AI to work in the physical world. The thesis, roughly, is that the software has matured and the next frontier is giving it hands.

For SoftBank’s founder, Masayoshi Son, the interest is not new. The company unveiled its Pepper humanoid back in 2014, then quietly halted production in 2020. More recently it has gone on the offensive, agreeing last year to buy Swiss group ABB’s industrial robotics arm for $5.4bn, and weighing a plan to create and list an AI and robotics company called Roze.

An Agile Robots cheque would slot neatly into that pattern, part of Europe’s quietly building robotics scene that Son keeps returning to, alongside his €75bn plan for AI data centres in France.

Agile Robots would also be joining a crowded European field. Germany’s Neura Robotics recently raised about €1bn, backed by stablecoin issuer Tether, at a roughly €4bn valuation, and Norwegian-American startup 1X was reported to be in talks for as much as $1bn at a $10bn valuation.

The money is arriving faster than the robots, which remains the recurring feature of the sector. For now, Agile Robots’ round is a conversation, with the cheques still being written.