Microagi raises $55M — Germany's largest ever seed — to build the data layer for factory robots

Microagi, a Munich-based startup founded roughly ten months ago by former Formula 1 engineers Bercan Kilic (CEO, previously Red Bull Racing aerodynamics) and Nico Nussbaum (CTO), has raised $55 million (approximately €50 million) in what Sifted describes as Germany's largest ever seed round. The deal was led by Hummingbird, with participation from Northzone, LocalGlobe, Village Global, and Redalpine.

Microagi does not build robots. It does not build foundation models. It builds what both require before they can be industrially useful: the data layer. Through its Atlas platform, the company deploys engineers wearing head-mounted cameras into factories and manufacturing floors, capturing first-person footage of real operational tasks — sorting, assembly, quality-checking — that can then be used to fine-tune robotics models for specific industrial environments. A parallel consumer arm runs home-cleaning and private-chef programmes in New York and San Francisco to capture household training data. The $55 million funds expansion on both fronts, and deeper development with European industrial customers across automotive, logistics, and food.

The European manufacturing argument

Kilic frames the company explicitly around European competitive decline. "In the last 60 years, we've offshored a lot to the east, so there are many skills we never mastered in Europe," he told Sifted. "We've fallen behind in our ability to do things in-house, and we've lost price-competitiveness." The move from Formula 1 aerodynamics to factory robotics is less a career swerve than a consistent preoccupation: the physical performance of complex machines under competitive conditions.

Nussbaum describes the flywheel Microagi is trying to build. "We put our engineers on site with each customer, and the system learns from their real operations and feeds that back into the next run," he said. "So every month we're there, they pull a little further ahead of their competitors." The physical-world data flywheel carries different economics from a software equivalent: deploying humans with cameras is not trivially scaled, which makes any footage gathered more expensive to replicate — simultaneously a bottleneck and, if the constraint holds, a moat.

A record round, a modest company

At roughly ten months old, Microagi is raising at a scale most Series A companies have not reached. Kilic does not oversell it. "It's one-billionth of what Europe needs," he told Sifted. That framing is part humility, part positioning: the round is large for a seed but genuinely small relative to the ambition of training a generation of robots for European industry.

The robotics timeline debate remains unsettled. At Machina, the major robotics gathering held in Paris last week, investor estimates for when a humanoid robot could autonomously complete a routine task ranged from one year to ten. Kilic predicts a robot capable of roughly ten routine tasks will exist in a year — but notes that more complex operations like plumbing will take far longer. Whether the timeline is one year or ten, Microagi's thesis requires the data to exist before the hardware is ready. The window to build the leading proprietary dataset in European manufacturing is, by that logic, now.

Northzone and LocalGlobe are both active in European deeptech. Village Global and Redalpine round out a cap table that is notably VC-heavy, with no industrial corporate investors — a contrast to Syntetica's structure last week, where manufacturers and supply-chain players anchored the round alongside VC.