Theker’s $85M Series A Bets on Robots That Rethink the Factory Floor

Barcelona-based AI robotics startup Theker said on Thursday it has raised $85 million in a Series A round that it calls the largest robotics Series A ever completed in Europe. The round was led by US venture firm CRV, with Samsung, LVMH-backed Aglaé Ventures, Cathay Innovation, 20VC and Henkel Ventures also participating.

Theker was founded in 2022 by engineers Carla Gómez Cano and Jiaqiang Ye Zhu, and the new round comes less than a year after it closed €18 million in seed funding, the largest seed round in Spanish startup history at the time. The Barcelona company says it is building a new category of industrial robotics: AI-native generalist robots that adapt in real time to changing environments, mixed SKUs, irregular shapes and operational variability without manual reprogramming. The contrast Theker draws is with the legacy industrial robotics stack, which it describes as rigid, task-specific and costly to reconfigure. Its systems are already operating inside live production environments across Europe, with fashion group Inditex among its customers, and the $85M converts to roughly €73 million, per the announcement.

A $85 Million Bet That Industrial Robots Can Learn

The Series A was announced on June 11 and brings the full roster of new investors together with most of Theker’s existing backers, per the Theker’s $85M Series A announcement from CRV. New capital came from CRV, Samsung, LVMH-backed Aglaé Ventures, Cathay Innovation, 20VC, Henkel Ventures, Korelya, Sonae and Mercadona. Returning investors include Inditex, Carles Reina (ElevenLabs), Itnig (the Factorial founders’ fund), Kfund, Kibo Ventures and Mission.

Theker says the new funding will accelerate deployments with tier-one industrial operators, deepen its proprietary AI and robotics stack, and expand the team across software, electronics, mechanical engineering and deployments. The company employs just over twenty specialists today, and that number is expected to grow four to five times over the next year. Its robots integrate advanced vision, control systems and large language models, and run on a robotics-as-a-service commercial model. Inditex, which invested in the seed round and is a customer, has been using the systems to automate high-variability logistics operations.

We didn’t build THEKER to run pilots. We built it to ship robots that work the day they arrive and continue improving every day after.

The quote is from co-founder Carla Gómez Cano, from the company’s June 11 press release. Her co-founder Jiaqiang Ye Zhu is the other half of the founding team.

• $85 million: the Series A round, per Theker’s June 11 announcement
• €18 million: the seed round Theker closed less than a year earlier, the largest seed in Spanish startup history at the time
• 2022: the year co-founders Carla Gómez Cano and Jiaqiang Ye Zhu founded the company
• 4 to 5x: the headcount expansion Theker expects over the next year
• “Largest robotics Series A ever in Europe”: Theker’s characterisation of the round

Why CRV, Samsung and LVMH Are Writing Checks in Barcelona

The investor mix is the clearest signal of how Theker is positioning itself. Industrial conglomerates rarely share a cap table with US growth VCs and European deep tech specialists, and the company says the round marks three simultaneous firsts: one of CRV’s first investments in Spain, Samsung’s first-ever investment in a Spanish company, and LVMH’s first investment in the Spanish startup ecosystem.

The press release frames the investors as global leaders in venture capital, consumer technology and luxury, a hint at the strategic logic. Samsung brings exposure to Asian electronics manufacturing scale, LVMH brings a luxury and complex-materials perspective (its corporate venture arm Aglaé Ventures is on the cap table), and Cathay Innovation, the US-Asia cross-border arm of Cathay Capital, brings channels in two of the world’s largest robotics markets. The mix is the kind of corporate cap table that traditional robotics vendors typically do not have, and that Theker is leaning on to bypass the slow procurement cycles that have defined industrial automation for decades.

• CRV (lead investor)
• Samsung
• LVMH-backed Aglaé Ventures
• Cathay Innovation
• 20VC
• Henkel Ventures
• Korelya
• Sonae
• Mercadona

The Factory Jobs Theker Wants to Automate First

Theker’s pitch is for the jobs that legacy automation cannot handle. Logistics sorting, retail picking, food and beverage handling, and waste management all involve objects that vary in size, orientation and material, the kind of variability that traditional industrial robots, built for repeatable tasks in stable conditions, struggle to absorb. Theker’s AI-native generalist robots are designed to handle that variability without per-task reprogramming.

The commercial model is robotics-as-a-service, which lowers the upfront capital customers need to deploy automation. Inditex, which invested in the seed round and is a customer, has been using the systems to automate high-variability logistics tasks in its network.

The two founders met building robots at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, where they founded the robotics association PUCRA. Gómez Cano has said in the company’s profile in the EIT Manufacturing network that the EU programme helped the company gain visibility within the European industrial landscape and connect with relevant players. Customers using Theker’s robots report stable throughput even when handling mixed or irregular objects, reduced reliance on repetitive physically demanding tasks, and greater consistency than manual or semi-automated workflows, per the same profile. Gómez Cano has called the Inditex validation a defining moment, and the company is now hiring across business, product and deployment functions as it scales.

The company is positioning itself against both ends of the robotics spectrum. Unlike humanoid robots designed around a fixed form, the machines are built to be reconfigured, per TechCrunch, and they are designed to move between jobs inside a facility as production needs shift. That positioning matters because the European industrial customer base is small relative to China’s, and Spanish operators are a fraction of that, so the only path to scale is to sell across the continent and into industries that have not historically bought robots at all.

The European Robotics Funding Map Is Heating Up

Theker’s round is the largest Series A in European robotics to date, but it is not the largest European robotics round of 2026. Germany’s Neura Robotics’ $1.4B Series C in physical AI came in larger, with Tether, Amazon, NVIDIA and Qualcomm on the cap table. Munich-based RobCo closed €100 million for modular AI-driven manufacturing systems, and Stuttgart-based Sereact raised €93 million to scale its physical AI platform into the US, according to a June 11 roundup by The Next Web.

The differences in stage, focus and geography are what the table lays out. Theker is the only Series A in the group and the only one headquartered in southern Europe, and it is the only one whose headline product is described as a generalist platform rather than a humanoid, a modular cell, or a vision system bolted onto existing arms. Neura is the largest by more than an order of magnitude, but it is also a Series C, and its product is targeted at a different customer: cognitive and humanoid robots designed to work alongside humans, a category that has attracted most of 2026’s US robotics capital.

The Incumbents Theker Is Trying to Displace

The legacy industrial robotics market is dominated by a handful of names, ABB, FANUC, KUKA and Yaskawa, the four vendors that have defined factory automation for decades. Their robots do a small number of jobs extremely well: welding, painting, pick-and-place on a fixed line, palletising in a known layout. The trade-off is rigidity, and that is the gap Theker is targeting.

The market backdrop is large and slowing. The IFR’s 2025 World Robotics installations report shows 542,000 industrial robot installations globally in 2024, the second-highest annual figure on record, but installations in Europe fell 8% that year to 85,000 units, the second-largest European total in history. Spain now ranks third in Europe with 5,100 installations, behind Germany and Italy, and the global operational stock of industrial robots rose 9% to 4.664 million units in 2024. The IFR expects global installations to reach 575,000 units in 2025 and to surpass 700,000 by 2028.

• 542,000: industrial robots installed globally in 2024, the second-highest annual figure on record (IFR)
• 85,000: European installations in 2024, down 8% year on year, the second-largest European total in history (IFR)
• 5,100: Spanish installations in 2024, third-largest in Europe behind Germany and Italy (IFR)
• 4.664 million: the global operational stock of industrial robots in 2024, up 9% year on year (IFR)
• 700,000: the IFR’s projected global installations figure for 2028

Spain Steps Into Europe’s Robotics Spotlight

Spain is the third-largest European market for industrial robots, with 5,100 installations in 2024, behind Germany and Italy, and the strongest demand came from the automotive industry. Spain’s robot density is still well below Germany’s, but the gap is closing, and the Theker round is the first major signal that Spanish capital and Spanish engineering can produce a robotics company with a globally competitive valuation.

The Spanish robotics sector has been building for years, with public research at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and a small but growing network of industrial partners. The PUCRA robotics association at UPC, the seed round from Kibo Ventures and Kfund, the Inditex relationship, and the EIT Manufacturing membership were all pieces of that build. The next test for the Spanish story is whether Theker’s robots perform as advertised across industries and across geographies, and whether other Spanish robotics companies can repeat the same capital formation pattern. The company has framed the investment as positioning Barcelona as an increasingly important global hub for AI and robotics innovation.

• Polytechnic University of Catalonia and its PUCRA robotics association
• Kibo Ventures (seed lead)
• Kfund’s Leadwind fund
• Inditex (strategic investor and customer)
• EIT Manufacturing (EU network partner)

The Gap Between Research Demo and Real Production

Theker’s own announcement names the problem the round is supposed to solve. Few companies globally have, in the company’s words, “successfully bridged the gap between research demonstrations and robots capable of operating reliably in real-world production environments at scale.” Theker describes itself as “one of the category leaders” to do so.

That is a claim, and the round is structured to test it. The $85M funds deployments with tier-one industrial operators, an expansion of the engineering team four to five times, and a deeper push into the proprietary stack. CRV general partner Reid Christian, who led the round, said Theker has paired “a deeply technical platform” with “real commercial deployment momentum,” and that the company has “the potential to become one of the defining robotics companies of this generation.”

The benchmark will be deployment, not announcements. The IFR expects global robot installations to reach 575,000 units in 2025 and to surpass 700,000 by 2028, with European installations recovering from the 2024 dip. Theker’s robots are not yet counted in those figures, since the company sells to operators rather than reporting installation data to the IFR. The next phase of deployment at Inditex and with the tier-one operators the new funding will bring in is the first real test of whether the “AI-native generalist” framing survives contact with a real factory floor.