Agile Robots' $8.5 billion bet: a humanoid maker that bought the whole factory first

$500 million funding round for Agile Robots

Most humanoid robot companies start with a robot and go looking for a factory to put it in. Agile Robots did it the other way around.

The Munich company announced a $500 million Series F today at an $8.5 billion valuation, led by SoftBank Group, with NVIDIA, Hitachi and Hitachi Ventures, T.Capital and others joining. Agile says total funding is now $2 billion, and the money is earmarked for U.S. expansion, more production capacity (including in Germany), and new markets.

The size of the round is significant, obviously. What's more interesting is what Agile Robots has assembled over the past three years: robot arms, cobots, mobile robots, a voice AI company, two automation integrators, a German heritage plant engineering firm, an Indian integrator, and, on top of all that, a family of humanoids.

Agile Robots isn't a humanoid startup that happens to sell arms. It's an industrial automation group that has decided humanoids are the next layer.

When I chatted with CEO and founder Dr. Zhaopeng Chen in Munich earlier this year, he hinted that a new raise was coming. In an additional statement shared with me today, he says physical AI is about to hit a tipping point.

"What we see in our labs and in real production conditions today tells us that Physical AI is on the brink of a breakthrough," Chen says. "Intelligent robots are about to become far more capable, and the way we work in the real world will change, sooner than most expect."

Production conditions is the key phrase there. Very few humanoid companies have any.

Built by acquisition

Agile Robots spun out of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in 2018, founded by Chen and Peter Meusel, both researchers at DLR's Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics. For its first five years it was mostly an arm and cobot maker, best known for the Diana series.

Then, starting in 2023, it went shopping.

Each deal fills a different gap.

BÄR Automation gave Agile Robots the ability to deliver finished production cells rather than loose robots. idealworks brought mobile robots, fleet software and a very large, very real deployment at BMW, which stays on as a long-term partner. As Sacra points out, that turned BMW from a potential arm customer into a fleet customer.

Franka was a distressed buy.

Agile Robots picked it up just two months after Franka filed for preliminary insolvency, keeping its staff. (It wasn't uncontroversial: German press reported that rival bidders tried to block the sale by pointing to Agile Robots' Chinese connections.) Franka's research arms are now a staple in robot learning labs, and Agile Robots builds them in its own Kaufbeuren plant, where the 1,000th Franka Research 3 rolled off the line in February 2025.

A lot of the world's robot-learning research happens on hardware Agile Robots now makes.

audEERING is the oddball, and also the most humanoid-relevant of the smaller deals. It analyzes speech, speaker state and dozens of emotional expressions in real time. If your humanoid is going to take spoken instructions on a noisy factory floor, that's useful, I think.

Krause Automation is the big one, though.

The former thyssenkrupp unit traces back to Johann A. Krause, founded in Bremen in 1950, and builds whole automated production systems, mostly for automotive. The deal added about 650 experts and 10 locations, and crucially, a North American footprint. Agile Robots, thyssenkrupp and the IG Metall union signed a Best and Fair Owner agreement on employment terms ahead of closing.

"The acquisition reflects our ambition to harness the full potential of Physical AI for global industries," Chen said when the deal closed in April.

Then in August, Agile Robots took a majority stake in XNG Automation in Bengaluru. Agile Robots already supplies automation to Foxconn and Tata Electronics in India, both iPhone assemblers, and opened a factory in Chennai in 2024.

"Investing in and partnering with XNG Automation further strengthens Agile Robots' position in the rapidly growing Indian manufacturing sector," said Rory Sexton, Agile Robots' executive director.

Add it up and a big chunk of Agile Robots' 3,500 employees came in through acquisitions: roughly 650 from Krause, 200 from XNG, 140 from BÄR, 100 from Franka, and 70 from audEERING.

The factory is the product

When I toured Agile Robots' factory near Munich, Sexton, a former Apple executive, summed up the strategy: "the factory is the product." The robots, including humanoids, are components inside a larger automated system that Agile Robots designs, builds, installs and maintains.

That's a fundamentally different go-to-market than most humanoid companies have.

A pure-play humanoid maker might have to convince a factory to rework a line around an unproven robot, usually via an integrator it doesn't control. Agile Robots increasingly is the integrator. It can win a plant automation contract on the strength of arms, AMRs and engineering, then drop humanoids into the stations where they make sense.

It also produces data.

Agile Robots says it has more than 20,000 robotic solutions installed worldwide, and Sacra notes that this installed base generates the kind of real-world industrial data that humanoid-first companies don't yet have.

The humanoid line: Agile ONE

Agile Robots launched Agile ONE, its full-size industrial humanoid, in November 2025.

It's 174 cm tall, weighs 69 kg, has 40 degrees of freedom, carries about 20 kg, and uses dexterous five-fingered hands with 21 joints each, which grew out of Chen's original DLR research on robotic hands. Its models are trained in the Industrial AI Cloud that Deutsche Telekom and NVIDIA run in Munich, and in February an Agile ONE literally pressed the button to switch that cloud on.

There's also a smaller Agile ONE S for R&D, and in October the company and NVIDIA unveiled Agile ONE SN, a compact research humanoid preconfigured with Jetson Thor and Isaac GR00T. Chen told Reuters Agile Robots plans to build 1,000 to 2,000 of those next year. That's a smart play: it puts Agile Robots hardware in research labs the same way Franka arms already are.

On the model side, Agile Robots announced a research partnership with Google DeepMind in March to bring Gemini Robotics models onto its industrial systems.

Production capacity is real, at least on paper.

The new Fürstenfeldbruck site near Munich, opened early this year, can produce up to 10,000 legged and wheeled humanoids a year, according to the company. When I visited, the humanoids Agile Robots was actually shipping were wheeled, not legged. On flat factory floors that's a pragmatic choice, and it's one several Chinese humanoid makers have made too.

The money

Agile Robots' financial history has some gaps.

The last publicly disclosed valuation I can find is roughly $1 billion, when SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led a $220 million Series C in 2021, according to Sacra. Publicly reported rounds before today add up to only a few hundred million dollars. The company now says it has raised $2 billion in total, which suggests a lot of capital came in that was never announced.

Revenue is easier to see, at least according to Sacra. Agile Robots looks to have roughly doubled revenue every year since founding, reaching about €200 million in 2024. Sacra estimates $339 million for 2025 and says the company has guided to $690 million for 2026. If that guidance holds, today's $8.5 billion valuation is about 12X forward revenue, or roughly 25X trailing.

For comparison, KUKA did €3.9 billion in revenue last year, per Sacra, so Agile Robots is still a fraction of the incumbents' scale. But it's growing far faster, and it's valued like a growth company, not an industrial one.

Compare that to the humanoid pure-plays.

Agility Robotics started trading on NASDAQ as AGLT last week with very minimal revenue. Figure AI was valued at $39 billion after its September 2025 round. Agibot, the world's biggest humanoid maker by volume, is pushing hard outside China. In Europe, a young UK company became the continent's newest humanoid unicorn in September, and German rival Neura Robotics has raised more capital than Agile Robots.

Against that field, Agile Robots is the outlier: hundreds of millions in revenue, a big installed base, its own integrators, and humanoids as an add-on rather than the whole business.

The investor list reflects that. SoftBank is back for a second time as lead. NVIDIA is both investor and technology partner. Hitachi brings a global industrial customer base.

"We believe Physical AI will transform industries. Agile Robots combines deep robotics expertise with the ability to execute at industrial scale, enabling it to bring Physical AI into everyday operations," said Dennis Chang, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers.

What to watch

Three things will tell us whether this works.

First, integration. Six acquisitions in three years, across Germany, the U.S. and India, is a lot to digest, especially the 650-person Krause unit from a struggling automotive supply chain.

Second, the U.S. Krause gives Agile Robots a North American base, and the company says expansion there is a priority for this round. Competing with Agility, Figure, Apptronik and Tesla on home turf won't be easy, but it will be necessary, given the current FCC rules around foreign robots.

Third, the humanoids themselves. Agile Robots has the capacity to build 10,000 a year and the channels to sell them. How many legged or wheeled Agile ONEs are actually doing paid work on customer lines a year will be very interesting.

We'll be tracking it on Agile ONE's HumanoidMegaHub page.

Sources

• Agile Robots press release, November 12, 2026, and additional statement from Dr. Zhaopeng Chen
• Inside The European Factory Where Robots Are Building Robots (Forbes)
• Sacra: Agile Robots
• Agile Robots: BÄR Automation
• Agile Robots: idealworks
• The Robot Report: Franka Emika
• Franka Robotics: 1,000th FR3
• Agile Robots: audEERING
• The Robot Report: thyssenkrupp Automation Engineering
• Evertiq: Krause Automation deal closes
• Agile Robots: XNG Automation
• Agile Robots: Agile ONE switches on Industrial AI Cloud
• TechRepublic: Agile ONE SN
• TechNode/Reuters: up to 2,000 research humanoids
• Agility Robotics lists on NASDAQ (Forbes)
• Agibot and robot work measurement (Forbes)
• Europe's newest humanoid robot unicorn (Forbes)
• HumanoidMegaHub: Agile ONE