SoftBank leads $500M round valuing humanoid maker Agile Robots at $8.5B
Munich-based Agile Robots closed a $500 million Series F led by SoftBank at an $8.5 billion valuation, with Nvidia and Hitachi joining, as it ramps humanoid production and expands in the US.
Agile Robots, the Munich company that builds robotic arms, hands, mobile robots and humanoids for factories, has closed a $500 million Series F at an $8.5 billion valuation, it said on Thursday. SoftBank Group led the round, with Nvidia, Hitachi and Hitachi Ventures, and T.Capital among the other investors. The company says the round takes its total funding to $2 billion.
The money is meant for three things, according to the company: a bigger presence in the United States, more production capacity, including in Germany, and entry into new markets. Agile Robots told AFP it is now Europe's most valuable "physical AI" robotics company.
An industrial base first, humanoids second
Agile Robots was founded in 2018 as a spin-off from the German Aerospace Center (DLR), and much of its business still sits in conventional industrial automation. The company says it has installed more than 20,000 robotic systems for customers in automotive, consumer electronics, logistics and other industries. It reports more than 2,000 research and development staff and more than 650 patents, and it owns several subsidiaries, including the robotics research platform maker Franka Robotics and Krause Automation, which it bought from thyssenkrupp.
Humanoids are the newer bet. Early in 2026 the company opened a plant at Fürstenfeldbruck, outside Munich, that it says can build up to 10,000 legged and wheeled humanoid robots a year. That figure is capacity, not output. Citing Bloomberg, Quartz reports that Agile Robots aims to produce about 2,000 humanoids in 2026 and that output could be two to three times higher in 2027. Its Agile ONE humanoid has entered initial production at the site, and the company has placed its latest systems in trials with industrial customers such as Audi, according to the same report.
In October the company launched the ONE SN, a research humanoid built on Nvidia's Isaac GR00T robot models and Jetson Thor computer, Tech Funding News reports. Agile Robots has also described training its robots by filming human workers doing the tasks it wants to automate. Bloomberg, as cited by Quartz, lists battery life, weight balance and the quality of real-world training data as problems the industry has not yet solved.
A smaller round than first discussed
The raise comes in below earlier talk. Bloomberg reported in June that a round of roughly $800 million was under discussion, according to Quartz. Agile Robots has not published revenue figures.
SoftBank is not a new backer. It led Agile Robots' $220 million Series C in 2021, a round that made the company Germany's first robotics unicorn, according to Tech Funding News. SoftBank Investment Advisers managing partner Dennis Chang said in the company's announcement that Agile Robots combines robotics expertise with "the ability to execute at industrial scale."
SoftBank's wider robotics push
The investment fits a broader SoftBank strategy in robotics. In October 2025 SoftBank agreed to buy ABB's robotics business for $5.375 billion, and in that announcement it named Agile Robots alongside Skild AI, AutoStore and Berkshire Grey as robotics holdings it planned to combine with the ABB unit. That deal hit an obstacle last week: SoftBank said on November 6 that China's foreign investment security review office had prohibited the acquisition of ABB's robotics business in China, and that it was working with ABB on the transaction.
Investor money for robots that do physical work keeps getting larger. Venture Block has covered Bedrock Robotics' $600 million round for driverless excavators and Zipline's $1.5 billion raise for drone delivery. In Europe, Agile Robots' new valuation is above the roughly $7 billion that fellow German humanoid developer Neura Robotics was reported to be worth in June, according to Quartz, citing The Next Web. The U.S. leaders are bigger still: Tech Funding News puts Figure AI at $39 billion and says Apptronik raised $520 million at a $5 billion valuation. Europe's other recent hardware rounds include British chip startup Fractile, which drew the UK's Sovereign AI Fund.
The next milestone for Agile Robots is turning factory capacity into paid deployments. Chief executive Zhaopeng Chen said the funding lets the company "build out production capacity," with the U.S. expansion and the Fürstenfeldbruck ramp the first places to watch.
