Agile Robots raises $500 million at an $8.5 billion valuation in a round led by SoftBank

The German start-up Agile Robots has raised $500 million in a funding round led by Japan's SoftBank Group, valuing the Munich company at $8.5 billion. The chip company Nvidia and the Hitachi group are among the other investors.

Agile Robots has raised about $2 billion since it was founded in 2018. Its chief executive, Zhaopeng Chen, told Handelsblatt the money will go into more production capacity and faster expansion, and that the next factory will probably be built in the US.

Early this year the company opened a factory in Fürstenfeldbruck near Munich that is designed to make up to 10,000 humanoid robots with legs or wheels a year. Chen would not say how many have been delivered to customers, but said mass production of the Agile One will start next year, with the aim of tripling production capacity.

Chen told Handelsblatt that Agile Robots is now the most valuable robotics company in Europe. According to the paper, it moves ahead of Neura Robotics from Metzingen, valued at about $7 billion since raising up to $1.4 billion in the summer.