Theker’s $85 Million Round Pulls Buyers Onto the Cap Table

Theker closed an $85 million Series A on June 11, 2026, with fashion, grocery and electronics names sitting where customers usually sit.

CRV led the Barcelona round (about €73 million). Inditex, Mercadona, Samsung and Aglaé Ventures, the vehicle tied to LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault, joined a cap table that already treated warehouse work as the product.

Inditex and Mercadona Sat Down as Buyers and Backers

The check size is the headline. The names on the term sheet are the business. Fast-fashion logistics, Spanish grocery and consumer electronics do not write robotics cheques as a hobby. They have lines that still need hands for mixed cartons, crumpled garments and bottles that never arrive in the same pose twice.

CRV, the US firm, led what Theker called Europe’s largest robotics Series A claim, with Samsung, LVMH, Cathay, 20VC, Henkel, Korelya, Sonae and Mercadona joining existing backers including Inditex, Kibo Ventures, Kfund, Itnig, Mission and Carles Reina. The company put the same claim on its own channel the day the round closed.

We just raised $85M, Europe's largest ever robotics Series A, led by @CRV, with backing from @Samsung and @LVMH.

But this story did not start today.

Carla and Jia have been obsessed with robots since they were kids. They met as engineers at UPC, started the university's… pic.twitter.com/ivMbZVfm4G

— THEKER Robotics (@THEKER_ai) June 11, 2026

Inditex, the parent of Zara, was already a client before it was a shareholder. That loop is the point of this syndicate. Mercadona, the Spanish supermarket group, came in on the Series A. Henkel Ventures brought a chemicals and adhesives manufacturer. Samsung arrived as an investor and, in June, as a possible customer and supplier at the same time.

WHO HOLDS THE INDUSTRIAL SKIN

A buyer who also holds equity has a reason to open a live line, then keep feeding the company the ugly cases a demo never sees. That is a flatter path than a robotics startup that sells through an innovation lab and waits a year for a pilot to finish.

The Same Arm Packs Clothes and Parcels

Co-founder Carla Gómez Cano puts the gap in one kitchen image. Traditional cells are brilliant when the object never changes. Most warehouses are not that kind of kitchen.

If you always have to put the same cookie in the same box, that works perfectly, but most processes aren’t like that.

Carla Gómez Cano, co-founder of Theker

Theker, founded in 2022, builds what it calls AI-native generalist robots for live industrial rooms. Hands, arms and overall form can be swapped or resized for packing clothes, sorting parcels or handling bottles and cans. The company says the cells go in in days, keep learning on the line and do not need a reprogram every time a SKU changes.

That is a different object from the walking factory worker that has soaked up most of the global robotics money. Theker’s pitch is a reconfigurable cell that works the day it arrives. Cathay Innovation, which invested, described a full stack of software, electronics, grippers and in-house making, sold as robotics as a service, so Theker stays on the hook for uptime after the cell is in.

Europe is not short of rigid arms. The International Federation of Robotics counted 85,006 industrial robot installations in Europe in 2024, down 8% as car plants slowed. The work Theker is chasing is the slice those arms never took: soft goods, mixed parcels and shapes that shift mid-shift. Fashion money showing up for that slice is not a branding accident. It is a warehouse with hanging garments that refuse to sit still.

MANGO and Paack Already Run the Cells

The company says it skips innovation departments and goes to logistics and operations, where the deal is a live line and the clock is short. Gómez Cano said she and co-founder Jiaqiang Ye Zhu did not build Theker to run pilots. The public floor list now has three named Spanish operators, which is still a short list, and it is a list of production rooms rather than lab tours.

FROM A UPC LAB TO LIVE WAREHOUSES

1. 2022: Gómez Cano and Ye Zhu found Theker in Barcelona after meeting as engineers at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.
2. July 2025: Theker raises a $21 million seed, with Inditex already a client and then a backer.
3. April 2026: Paack starts a robotic cell for mixed-shape parcel induction at San Fernando de Henares, near Madrid, with a Barcelona hub in tests.
4. June 11, 2026: Theker closes the $85 million Series A led by CRV.
5. July 30, 2026: Theker says its robots are running inside MANGO’s logistics chain, a network that supplies more than 120 markets.

The MANGO cell is in Lliçà d’Amunt, in the Barcelona area, on handling and distribution work. Theker called it production technology inside one of the harder retail logistics chains, and it posted the floor as a win from Barcelona rather than a move to California.

Our robots are already operating inside @Mango's logistics chain 🦾

We started THEKER with a simple idea: build intelligent robots that adapt to real environments, not the other way around.

Today we're announcing our collaboration with MANGO to develop the next generation of… pic.twitter.com/u3jVFbOs5F

— THEKER Robotics (@THEKER_ai) July 30, 2026

Paack’s Mixed Parcel Cell Near Madrid

Paack, the last-mile parcel firm, put a cell on induction, the messy first grab of packages that arrive in every shape, size, angle and weight. The companies said the cell talks to the rest of the warehouse in real time and is built to copy across stations. San Fernando de Henares is the live site. Barcelona was still in tests when that work was described in April.

Three named floors do not make a continent. They do give the Series A a different texture from a round sold on videos of a robot folding a shirt once. Inditex, MANGO and Paack are all in the same problem family: high mix, soft or irregular objects, little patience for a six-month integration.

Spain’s First Checks From Samsung and LVMH

The company and Cathay both flagged three firsts around the same close. The round is one of CRV’s first investments in Spain, Samsung’s first in a Spanish company, and LVMH’s first in the Spanish startup scene, via Aglaé. Those firsts are useful as a map of who had not been writing Spanish robotics cheques, and they are not a quality stamp on their own.

THEKER is solving one of the most important challenges in robotics: bringing general-purpose AI into real production environments where reliability, adaptability and scale actually matter. What Carla, Jiaqiang and the team have built is exceptionally rare, a deeply technical platform paired with real commercial deployment momentum.

Reid Christian, general partner, CRV

Gómez Cano said in June that Samsung was not a client yet and that talks were advanced. She said Theker would take the Korean group as customer, supplier and investor at once, a mix that would give a young robotics firm a manufacturing reference it still lacks. That talk was live in June. It had not been announced as a signed factory deal by the time MANGO went public in July.

LVMH’s path is Aglaé, not a press shot of a trunk line in a Louis Vuitton workshop. Luxury supply chains have the same mixed-SKU headache as Zara’s, at lower volume and higher cost of a miss. Henkel’s presence is easier to read: plants that glue, wash and pack, with changeovers that punish a cell welded to one motion.

A UPC Robotics Club Became the Company

Gómez Cano and Ye Zhu met at UPC, started the university’s robotics club, and competed at international level, a story the company told in its own round post. Years of contest robots became a firm that still keeps its head office in Barcelona and talks about building “the biggest company in the world” from there. Gómez Cano told robotics investor Lukas Ziegler, “What we want to do is to build our own company. And to build the best company in the world from here, from Barcelona.”

That choice is now part of the sales pitch. Theker has a showroom in central Barcelona and says it will open others as it moves through Europe, the US and Asia. Gómez Cano said staying in the city “has never been a barrier to acceleration for us, so we are making the most of it.”

The seed in July 2025, which Theker called Spain’s largest, already had Inditex in the room as a user of the cells. EIT Manufacturing, writing before the Series A, said Inditex already validated the early robots on high-mix logistics, the same problem MANGO is now paying to run. The Series A did not invent that relationship. It priced it.

What Theker Will Do With $85 Million

Theker said the new money will speed rollouts with large industrial operators, deepen its own AI and robotics stack, and grow the team. The hire list is software, electronics, mechanical engineering and the people who put cells on floors. That last group is the one that turns a cap table of operators into more training data.

WHERE THE $85 MILLION GOES

• Live rollouts: Faster installs with large industrial operators, the same channel Gómez Cano said the firm already uses instead of innovation labs.
• The stack: More work on the in-house software, electronics and grippers that let one cell change task without a rewrite.
• The crew: Headcount across software, electronics, mechanical engineering and on-site rollout, with hiring across software and deployments posted the day the round landed.

Gómez Cano said in June the firm had already received 15,000 job applications “and have to filter like crazy.” She put the team in the dozens and said it could rise to as many as 120 people by the end of 2026, then caught herself, because she had also said the raise would come in at $30 million or $40 million. Robotics as a service is the commercial wrapper: the customer does not have to buy a cell as a capex lump, and Theker keeps the performance risk.

Twice the Target, Then a Hiring Wave

The $85 million close sits more than double the $40 million ceiling Gómez Cano had mentioned. Total cash raised across seed and Series A is $106 million. In July, Humanoid, a London startup, announced a $152 million Series A for walking industrial machines, a larger early round in a different product. Theker’s June record line was its own, dated the day CRV signed, and it described arms and grippers, not a humanoid.

The open questions are ordinary and expensive. Samsung as customer and supplier is still a talk until a plant is named. Three public floors in Spain do not yet prove a global rollout. A service contract only works if the cell stays up, and the firm that owns the hardware also owns the night shift when a gripper starts dropping polybags.

MANGO’s chain, Inditex’s lines and Paack’s induction cell are already feeding the stack the crumpled shirts and bent parcels that a clean lab never ships. That is what the fashion and grocery names bought: more of those rooms, and the data that comes with them.