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.

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.