Robotics Startup microagi Raises $55M to Train Factory Robots

A Munich-based robotics startup founded by a former Red Bull Racing engineer has closed the largest seed round ever raised by a German company. microagi locked in $55 million from Hummingbird, Northzone, LocalGlobe, Village Global, and redalpine. The company declined to disclose its valuation.

Bercan Kilic left his job as an aerodynamics engineer for Red Bull Racing in 2023. He told Business Insider that the thrill of Formula One engineering wore off quickly. He wanted to build something bigger. His target: teaching robots to work in factories.

microagi does not build its own robots or AI models. Instead, it records workers using cameras and sensor-equipped gloves. That footage trains existing robotics models to perform specific tasks inside a customer's factory. Five companies are already collecting data through the platform, with one preparing to deploy robots in a factory, Kilic said.

The round comes as investors pour money into robotics and physical AI. The driver is the move from chatbots into machines, falling hardware costs, labor shortages, and pressure to reshore supply chains. China installed 295,000 factory robots in 2024, or 54% of the global total, according to the International Federation of Robotics. The U.S. installed 34,200.

"If you run factories, the math is already on your desk," Kilic said. "Your most experienced people retire this decade, and their replacements were never born. Reshoring only works if the robots do."

The Data Bottleneck

microagi's consumer-facing arm, shift, went viral this year for offering free apartment cleanings in New York in exchange for first-person footage of cleaners. This week, shift began offering free private chefs in San Francisco. The operation pays more than 20,000 people across 15 countries to record themselves performing physical tasks, Kilic said. It sells that footage to AI labs and robotics companies working on robot "brains."

Shift is microagi's answer to what UC Berkeley roboticist Ken Goldberg has called the "100,000-year data gap" – the disparity between training data available to robots and chatbots. Large language models were trained on vast internet text and images. No comparable trove exists for robots. shift competes with Scale AI, Turing, and micro1, which also pay people to record tasks.

Kilic views robotics as approaching its "GPT-2 moment" – the point in language model development where adding more data and computing power produced predictable gains. He said the industry is not far from its "GPT-3.5 moment," when the technology becomes useful enough for broad deployment.

microagi employs 37 people globally. shift has about 75. The new funding will go toward computing power for training, expanding shift's data collection network, and growing its U.S. presence from New York, Kilic said.

Hummingbird managing partner Firat Ileri, who led the investment, said he was struck by the intensity during a visit to microagi's Munich headquarters. "Employees rarely seem to leave the office," he said. Ileri cited the startup's ambition and its focus on automating European factories as the continent's workforce ages and shrinks. The EU's median age reached 44.9 in 2025, up from 39.6 two decades earlier, according to Eurostat. The European Commission estimates the bloc's workforce could shrink by 18.8 million people by 2050.

Kilic's four cofounders are former Mercedes F1 engineer Yoan Iliev, former Alan Turing Institute researcher Anton Poletaev, RWTH Aachen engineer Nico Nussbaum, and serial entrepreneur Artjem Weissbeck. The five cofounders have set a target: to become the world's largest company within five years, with technology running on tens of millions of robots.

"In five years, if we haven't deployed more than 20 million or 30 million robots, it's a big failure," Kilic said.