Agile Robots SE

What the company builds

Agile Robots SE is a Munich robotics and automation supplier founded in 2018 as a spin-off of the German Aerospace Center's Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics. Its catalogue is broad for a company of its age: the force-sensitive Diana 7 and FR3 arms, the Thor series, the Agile Hand, and a range of autonomous mobile robots and automated guided vehicles, all tied to an in-house software layer the company calls AgileCore. It converted from a German AG to a Societas Europaea effective 22 March 2024, and opened a new global headquarters in Munich's Sendling district in June 2025, where it says it has delivered more than 10,000 automation solutions.

Agile ONE and the physical-AI pitch

The company entered the humanoid category on 19 November 2025 with Agile ONE, a bipedal robot aimed at material transport, pick-and-place, machine tending, tool use and fine manipulation. Its distinguishing claim is the hand: fingertip and force-torque sensors in every joint, paired with foundation models the company says are trained on one of Europe's largest real-world industrial datasets plus simulated and human-collected data. Agile Robots said the robot would be built in-house in Bavaria beginning in early 2026. On 4 February 2026, Agile ONE pressed the button to switch on the Deutsche Telekom and NVIDIA Industrial AI Cloud in Munich, where Agile Robots is an anchor customer and plans to train its robot foundation models. The humanoid made its first public trade-show appearance at Hannover Messe in April 2026.

Growth by acquisition

Much of the company's scale has been bought rather than built. It absorbed the insolvent Munich arm maker Franka Emika in 2023 and took majority control of BMW spin-off idealworks the same year. In November 2025 it agreed to buy thyssenkrupp's Automation Engineering unit in Europe and North America; the deal closed on 1 April 2026 and the business now trades as Krause Automation, adding roughly 650 engineers and ten locations. Agile Robots has also said it is working with Google DeepMind on industrial robotics automation.

Money and scale

SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led a $220 million Series C in September 2021 that made Agile Robots Germany's first robotics unicorn; a smaller follow-on tranche led by Foxconn closed in 2022. Reporting in mid-2026 put cumulative capital raised at roughly $1.5 billion and described early talks over a further round of about $800 million, with SoftBank contributing more than $300 million. CEO Zhaopeng Chen told the Wall Street Journal the company booked about 300 million euros of revenue in 2025, expects roughly double that in 2026, and sees profitability in two to three years.

Where it sits

Agile Robots approaches humanoids from an installed base of industrial arms, AMRs and line-integration work, which distinguishes it from humanoid-first startups. Its closest domestic comparison is Neura Robotics; internationally it competes with US and Chinese industrial humanoid entrants, and with SoftBank's other robotics holdings, including ABB's robotics unit.