microagi Raises Germany's Biggest Seed Round to Teach Factory Robots Real Jobs
microagi raises a record $55M seed round to teach factory robots by filming human workers — no robots or models required
- Record seed round: microagi raised $55M led by Hummingbird — claimed to be the largest seed round ever by a German startup.
- The product: Atlas trains robot control policies from filmed worker demonstrations, then deploys them inside customer factories in automotive, logistics, and food.
- The data arm: Consumer brand "shift" pays 20,000+ people in 15 countries to film themselves doing chores, selling the footage to AI labs to close the robot training data gap.
- The team: Founded by ex-Red Bull F1 aerodynamicist Bercan Kilic and cofounders from Mercedes F1, the Alan Turing Institute, RWTH Aachen, and serial entrepreneurship.
- The market: China installed 295,000 factory robots in 2024 vs. 34,200 in the US; the EU faces losing 18.8M workers by 2050 — the urgency is structural.
- Early stage reality: Only one customer is close to factory deployment; funding goes toward compute, expanding shift's network, and a New York US base.
microagi, a Munich-based startup founded just ten months ago, has closed a $55 million seed round , what it claims is the largest seed round ever raised by a German company. The round was led by Hummingbird, with participation from Northzone, LocalGlobe, Village Global, and redalpine. The valuation was not disclosed.
The founder's backstory is almost too cinematic to be real. Bercan Kilic landed his dream job as an aerodynamics engineer for Red Bull Racing in 2023, joining the Formula One team at the height of its dominance , but the thrill quickly wore off. He wanted to put his skills toward something bigger: deploying robots in factories to bring about a world of abundant, low-cost goods and services. So he left F1 and started microagi in a Munich hacker house.
What microagi actually does
microagi helps manufacturers train robots for specific jobs. Rather than building its own robots or AI models, the company records workers using cameras and sensor-equipped gloves, then uses that footage to teach existing robotics models how to perform specific tasks inside a customer's factory. Think of it as the integration layer between frontier robot AI and the messy reality of a factory floor.
The business model is a two-sided flywheel:
- For AI labs: microagi provides the labs with data, the labs provide models, and then microagi layers on proprietary customer data to make its customers happy.
- For manufacturers: microagi adapts its partners' models using each customer's factory data, then helps deploy them on robots. Its customers span the automotive, logistics, and food industries.
Kilic declined to name microagi's model partners, though companies building this type of technology include Physical Intelligence, Skild AI, and Generalist AI. The platform is hardware-agnostic, meaning it can work with different robot bodies.