Most of the shares in the transaction are being sold by employees rather than newly issued by the company, according to The Wall Street Journal. New investors include Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective, while existing investors Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed, Lingotto and Leitmotif are also participating.
The transaction follows RobCo’s $100 million financing earlier this year, which valued the Munich-based company at approximately $500 million.
RobCo develops industrial robotics systems for manufacturing tasks including palletizing and materials handling. The company says it has sold more than 1,000 robots to industrial customers, including BMW, and is expanding its operations in the US through locations in Austin and San Francisco.
Its latest platform, Alfie, is a dual-arm robot designed to perform work currently handled manually on factory floors. RobCo says Alfie can adapt to new tasks, learn from errors and correct its actions without requiring conventional task-by-task programming. Those autonomy claims are company-reported and RobCo has not published independent performance benchmarks.
CEO and co-founder Roman Hölzl has relocated to San Francisco as the company expands its US operations. RobCo was founded in 2020 by researchers from the Technical University of Munich.
The $1 billion figure reflects the pricing of the latest secondary transaction rather than a new primary financing round. Much of the $40 million therefore goes to existing shareholders selling stock rather than onto RobCo’s balance sheet.
