Robotics data startup Microagi closed a $55 million seed funding round, the largest ever in Germany, the company said Thursday.
Microagi made headlines in May when it rolled out a service in New York offering free apartment cleanings, so long as customers let the company record everything. It has licensed some of that data exclusively to frontier AI labs, but it is also helping to shape the “brains” of robots Microagi deploys in its customers’ factories, founder and CEO Bercan Kilic told Semafor.
The company consults with manufacturing and logistics firms, collecting data and footage from live production lines and later implementing automation where possible.
It buys its hardware — often from Chinese robot-makers Unitree or UBTech — and leases it to factories where the company installs it — fine-tuned for each client.
This setup — Chinese bots injected with a German company’s software supplemented by training data collected in New York — underscores how despite geopolitical tensions and calls for decoupling in the tech industry, the actual development and deployment of physical AI remains heavily integrated across borders.