Flexion

What the company builds

Flexion Robotics AG is a Zurich software company that develops an autonomy stack for humanoid robots it does not manufacture. Registered in 2024 and based at Affolternstrasse 42 in Zurich, it emerged from stealth in November 2025 with a $50 million Series A and a stated position that the body is not the bottleneck. The founding team came out of ETH Zurich's Robotic Systems Lab and NVIDIA, where CEO Nikita Rudin and co-founder David Hoeller worked on Isaac Lab, the simulation framework widely used for reinforcement-learning research; other co-founders include Fabian Tischhauser and Julian Nubert, who leads perception.

Technical approach

The stack is layered rather than end-to-end. A language-driven command layer interprets instructions; a vision-language-action model, trained largely in simulation, generates motion; and a transformer-based whole-body controller executes it on hardware. The company's pitch rests on sim-to-real transfer and reinforcement learning, which it presents as a way to avoid dependence on teleoperation and large volumes of human demonstration data.

In June 2026 Flexion published Reflect v1.0, which it describes as a robot intelligence platform for long-horizon missions. A custom vision-language model acts as mission controller, tracking progress, selecting tools and replanning when steps fail; the demonstration mission involved moving between areas, opening doors, taking stairs and an elevator, handling a parcel and unpacking it into a drawer. Reported success figures are the company's own internal measurements rather than independent benchmarks, and Flexion has said the system is still confined to well-defined tasks. Reporting on the release also noted around 300 autonomous live demonstrations at ICRA 2026.

Hardware-agnosticism is tested against a mixed development fleet. A lab tour published in March 2026 showed a fleet of 14 humanoids in Zurich, including Unitree G1 units, PNDBotics' Adam and LimX Dynamics' Oli.

Funding and traction

The Series A was led by DST Global Partners with NVIDIA's venture arm NVentures, redalpine, Prosus Ventures and Moonfire, months after a $7.35 million seed from Frst, Moonfire and redalpine. Flexion said the money would expand its Zurich R&D team, compute and robot fleets, establish a US presence — its site lists a San Francisco address — and accelerate commercialisation with humanoid OEM partners in manufacturing, logistics and disaster response. Named customers, contract values and deployment counts have not been disclosed. The company continues to advertise engineering roles in Zurich and describes its team as small.

Competitive position

Flexion is betting against the vertical integration favoured by Figure and Tesla, selling intelligence to hardware makers instead of building a robot. That places it alongside better-capitalised software-first efforts — Physical Intelligence raised $600 million in 2025 — and against the in-house autonomy programmes of the OEMs it hopes to supply, several of which are Chinese vendors with their own model teams.