SoftBank Leads $500M Round in Agile Robots at $8.5B Valuation
Munich-based humanoid robot maker Agile Robots raised $500M led by SoftBank Group, with Nvidia, Hitachi and T.Capital participating, lifting its valuation to $8.5B and cumulative funding to roughly $2B. The capital will scale manufacturing and US expansion, with the company targeting about 2,000 humanoid units in 2026 and already testing systems at customers including Audi.
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IT之家 November 12 news — German robot manufacturer Agile Robots SE has completed a new round of financing, reaching a valuation of $8.5 billion (IT之家 note: approximately 56.829 billion RMB at current exchange rates). This round was led by SoftBank Group, providing new funding support for the startup to expand AI robot production scale.
Munich-based Agile Robots stated in a release that the company raised $500 million (approximately 3.343 billion RMB at current exchange rates) in this round, bringing total cumulative funding to approximately $2 billion (approximately 13.372 billion RMB at current exchange rates). Nvidia, Hitachi, and T.Capital also participated in this financing.
Agile Robots CEO Zhaopeng Chen once described the robotics technology race as a capital-intensive "war." As companies compete to develop physical AI and robotics technology, the industry is striving to push related products out of the testing phase and into real-world applications.
Agile Robots plans to use the new funding to expand operations in the United States and other markets, and to increase manufacturing capacity. The company recently opened a humanoid robot manufacturing facility near Munich and stated that it expects to produce approximately 2,000 humanoid robots in 2026, with output potentially growing to two or even three times that level in 2027.
Chen stated: "We are getting closer and closer to a critical turning point where humanoid robots will be more efficient than humans."
Currently, Agile Robots is testing some of its latest robot systems at manufacturing customer sites, including Volkswagen Group's Audi.
Additionally, the company has launched a compact robot weighing approximately 40 kilograms, primarily aimed at universities and laboratories for researchers to test the performance of underlying AI models in real-world environments.
Agile Robots hopes that by deploying robots in these real-world application scenarios, it can accumulate large amounts of training data to help robots improve their capabilities while making it easier for them to learn new tasks through retraining.
SoftBank has been one of the most active investors in the robotics field. Group founder Masayoshi Son has positioned the robotics business as a core component of the group's AI strategy.
Agile Robots was founded in 2018 by researchers from the German Aerospace Center (DLR), and its business covers the research and development of humanoid robots, mobile robots, robotic arms, and related control software.
Chen stated that for certain work tasks, humanoid robots are on the verge of achieving higher efficiency than human labor. However, the industry still faces multiple technical challenges, including battery endurance, weight distribution, and the quality of real-world training data.