Flip’s $25M Bet Puts AI on the Factory Floor at Last

Flip has raised $25 million to bring AI tools to the factory floor, store aisle and care home. Existing backers Notion Capital and HV Capital increased their stakes. L-Bank, the development bank of Baden-Württemberg, joined alongside business angels and other institutions.

The Stuttgart-founded company now reaches more than two million users across 1,000-plus brands. It employs 150 people in Germany, the UK and the US. The money funds the digital identity layer and custom-app generator that frontline teams have lacked while office workers raced ahead with copilots.

Fusion Builds Apps on the Spot for Each Store or Shift

At the centre of the raise sits Fusion. The product generates custom applications in real time for a specific store, team or process. Companies no longer need to run long tenders, buy generic software and then spend months customising it for each frontline use case.

Frontline Identity, launched in June, removes the old requirement for a corporate email address. Deskless employees log in and reach workplace systems, AI agents and company apps through a single secure layer. Together the two pieces form the infrastructure Flip says is missing before AI can stick on the assembly line.

• Fusion, real-time custom frontline apps tailored to site, team or workflow
• Frontline Identity, access without corporate email, the historical barrier for most deskless staff
• Embedded AI agents, knowledge, tasks and automation inside the same app rather than bolted-on tools
• Single mobile interface, communications, HR, ops and AI for workers who never open a laptop

Benedikt Brand, co-founder and CEO, put the problem plainly. “AI has long been part of everyday life in the office but, on the assembly line, in stores, or in care settings, it has barely arrived. This isn’t due to a lack of interest, but because many frontline organisations lack the digital identity and infrastructure required for AI to make a difference in daily operational work.”

We want to see a world where AI leaves no employee behind. This is why we are building the digital foundation companies need to bring their operational workforce into the AI era. After all, AI will only unlock its greatest economic value once it reaches every employee, not just those at a desk.

Benedikt Brand, Co-founder and CEO of Flip

The 80 Percent Still Wait for Tools Office Staff Already Use

Roughly 80 percent of the global workforce, about 2.7 billion people, work without a desk, company laptop or regular email. BCG research on the deskless labor shortage with technology puts the figure at 70-80 percent and documents the cost. Fifty-three percent of deskless workers report burnout. Forty-three percent are actively looking for new jobs.

Low engagement shows up as higher absenteeism, more defects and more safety incidents. Replacing one employee can cost up to 10 percent of annual salary. Companies with weaker satisfaction see 33 percent higher turnover and 15 percent lower productivity. The same study notes that many of these workers still rely on face-to-face updates because corporate systems were built for people who sit at screens.

Stats snapshot of the gap

• 2.7 billion deskless workers worldwide
• 53% report burnout
• 43% actively job hunting
• Up to 10% of salary to replace one leaver

Office AI adoption climbed fast. Frontline usage has lagged, creating what some analysts call a silicon ceiling. Flip’s bet is that the missing piece is not another chatbot but the identity and lightweight app layer that lets AI agents actually reach the people who keep factories, stores and hospitals running.

Investors Double Down After Watching the Category Form

Jos White, general partner at Notion Capital, said the firm has backed Flip since 2022. “We’ve backed Flip since 2022, and over that time we’ve watched the team build a leading position in the enterprise market, both within Europe and the US. That we are doubling down reflects our conviction that Flip is playing a defining role in shaping the category of AI for frontline teams.”

Fabian Gruner, partner at HV Capital, called Flip a trusted partner for companies that want to digitally enable frontline staff and praised the mix of product vision and cross-market execution. L-Bank’s entry adds a regional development-bank signal from Flip’s home state of Baden-Württemberg.

The round sits in a quieter corner of the AI funding wave. Most capital still chases knowledge-worker tools. A handful of European AI platforms have also raised at similar ticket sizes; another European AI platform that raised $25M focused on secondhand fashion plumbing. Flip’s focus stays on the operational majority.

Customers Already Show What Adoption Looks Like

Greif, a global industrial packaging firm, started with a pilot that hit 85 percent adoption, held 74 percent weekly active users and scored 4.3 out of 5 on satisfaction. It has since rolled Flip out to more than 100 sites across 15 countries. Europart, a parts distributor, has used the platform since 2021 and now covers about 2,000 employees at 300 locations in 28 countries, including AI-supported knowledge management.

Other names on the roster include McDonald’s, Rossmann, Porsche, SIXT, TEDi and the Australian Football League. The pattern is consistent: high-turnover, multi-site operations that need one mobile touchpoint rather than a stack of specialist systems.

From a Porsche Trainee’s Frustration to a Multi-Round Scale-Up

Brand started Flip in 2018 while a trainee inside Porsche, frustrated by the disconnect between headquarters and the factory floor. Early angels included former BASF chief Jürgen Hambrecht. The 2022 Series A brought in $30 million from HV Capital, Notion Capital and others, including former VW CEO Matthias Müller and Roland Berger.

1. 2018, Founded in Stuttgart out of factory-floor communication gaps
2. 2020, Early angels and institutional seed capital
3. 2022, $30 million Series A; international offices begin
4. 2024, Acquired UK-based The Bot Platform for low-code AI tools; BCG partnership study published
5. May 2025, $28 million Series A extension in 2025 pushed lifetime capital past $60 million; Flip Intelligence AI features expanded; Simon Eck joined as SVP Global Sales
6. June 2026, Frontline Identity and Fusion launched
7. August 2026, $25 million round to scale the infrastructure layer

By the 2025 extension the company already served more than 500 companies. Headcount has grown to 150. The latest capital keeps the focus on product infrastructure rather than pure geographic land-grab.

High-Turnover Sectors Feel the Pressure First

Manufacturing, retail, logistics, care and hospitality sit at the centre of Flip’s map. These are exactly the industries BCG and others flag for chronic labour shortages, seasonal spikes and high replacement costs. When shift planning, knowledge hand-over and basic HR tasks still run on paper, WhatsApp groups or outdated kiosks, AI agents have nowhere to land.

Digital tools do not erase physical operating costs. One early reaction on X noted that German industrial electricity prices remain among Europe’s highest; software efficiency still meets real energy and wage bills. Yet the retention and productivity maths from the BCG work is clear enough that investors keep writing cheques for the identity and app layer.

Flip positions itself against pure internal-comms players such as Staffbase and Beekeeper by stressing AI-native generation of custom apps and the no-email identity path. The claim is that one platform can replace a patchwork of specialist frontline tools.

The Infrastructure Layer Is the Actual Product

The $25 million is earmarked for further development of that identity-plus-agents-plus-custom-apps stack and for broader platform reach. Brand’s stated goal remains a world in which AI reaches every employee. For now the concrete deliverables are simpler: fewer barriers to login, fewer months spent customising software for each site, and AI features that live inside the same app workers already open for shifts and news.

Two million users and a thousand brands give the company a live test bed. Whether Fusion and Frontline Identity become the default way multi-site operators wire AI into daily ops will show up in the next set of adoption numbers and, eventually, in the turnover and productivity stats the sector already tracks.