From F1 tires to factory robots

The story of microagi doesn't follow the typical startup script. The five founders weren't brought together by a university lab or a corporate incubator, but by Munich's "HackerPenthouse," from which they launched into the world in September 2025 with the ambition to change how factories deploy robots.

CEO Bercan Kilic previously fine-tuned aerodynamics for Red Bull Racing and before that made a living as a professional esports player. CTO Nico Nussbaum came from the technical university RWTH Aachen. Other co-founders include Yoana Ilieva from Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1, Anton Poletaev from the prestigious Alan Turing Institute, and Artjem Weissbeck, who co-founded the WhatsApp commerce platform Charles and made the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list.

This unusual lineup convinced fund Hummingbird, which led the round, along with Northzone, LocalGlobe, Village Global, and redalpine. The resulting $55 million represents the largest seed round in German history. For comparison: the average seed round in Europe in 2025 hovered around €3–5 million.

What Atlas is and why it matters

At the core of microagi is the Atlas platform — a data and deployment layer that solves what roboticists call the "last mile problem." A robot can deliver flawless performance in laboratory conditions. But all it takes is an unusual material, a change in lighting, a different equipment variant, or even a differently packaged part — and the machine that was excelling moments ago suddenly stands still, clueless.

"Our partners build really good robots and models. Our work only begins after that, on the factory floor," explains CTO Nico Nussbaum. Microagi sends its engineers directly to customers, where they use special cameras and sensor gloves to record how experienced workers perform specific tasks. The platform then expands this data through simulations and fine-tunes existing AI models for the specific conditions of that factory.

A key feature of Atlas: it is independent of both the robot manufacturer and the AI model provider. A company can choose hardware from anyone (for example, from partners NVIDIA or Unitree) and microagi ensures the robot can actually handle work on its specific line. No vendor lock-in, no dependency on a single supply chain.

Why now: Europe against time and demographics

Microagi timed its market entry with the precision of an F1 pit stop. European industry faces three simultaneous pressures:

1. The demographic time bomb. Nearly 40 million workers in the EU are over the age of 55. The European Commission estimates that by 2050, the bloc could lose 18.8 million workers. The median age in the EU has risen from 39.6 in 2005 to 44.9 in 2025. "Your most experienced people will retire within this decade and their replacements were never born," says Kilic bluntly.

2. Rising costs and competition from China. Europe today accounts for approximately 15% of global industrial production, while China accounts for about 30%. In 2024, China installed 295,000 factory robots (54% of global installations), while Europe installed just 85,000 (16%). And this gap could widen — larger robotic fleets generate more operational data, enabling faster learning and improvement of systems.

3. Brain drain to California. "Europe produces some of the best roboticists in the world, and then watches them start companies in California," comments Firat Ileri, managing partner at Hummingbird. "What Europe lacked was ambition at a meaningful scale."

Shift: the viral consumer offshoot with 8 million views

While Atlas targets industrial customers, microagi also has a second — at first glance bizarre — face. It's called Shift and it's a consumer app that attracts people with free home cleaning in exchange for the ability to record their movements using head-mounted cameras.

The campaign launched in New York, where 250 free slots sold out instantly. The launch video set to Jay-Z and Alicia Keys' "Empire State of Mind" racked up nearly 8 million views. Microagi has since expanded Shift to include private chefs in San Francisco and plans expansion to London, Munich, and Zurich.

Why do they do it? Training data for robotic AI models is extremely scarce. While large language models (LLMs) like GPT or Claude have access to billions of text documents, for robots you need video footage of human hands performing specific activities — folding laundry, sorting items, cleaning. And not just any footage: it needs to be well-lit, capturing entire arms and hands.

Shift today employs approximately 10,000 operators across 15 countries, who together earned over $5 million in the first quarter of 2026. Operators receive approximately $20 per hour.

Who else is playing this game

Microagi enters a crowded but rapidly growing field. The global industrial robotics market was worth approximately $18.5 billion in 2025 and, according to Grand View Research, should exceed $44 billion by 2030. Total robotics investment in 2025 reached $27.6 billion, a year-on-year increase of 101% (PitchBook data).

Competitors include:

• NEURA Robotics (also Munich) — in June 2026 closed a Series C of up to $1.4 billion backed by Tether, Amazon, and Nvidia. Unlike microagi, it builds its own hardware and AI.
• Figure AI (USA) — valued around $39 billion, focused on humanoid robots.
• Skild AI — raised $1.4 billion at a $14 billion valuation, building a "universal brain" for robots.
• Physical Intelligence (USA) — backed by OpenAI, raised $400 million.

Bercan Kilic likens the current state of robotics to the "GPT-2 moment" — scaling data brings predictable improvement and the field is approaching the "GPT-3.5 moment," where robots will start being broadly useful. His five-year goal? 20 to 30 million deployed robots. "If we're not deploying more than 20 or 30 million in five years," he says, "that's a huge failure."

What it means for Czechia and Europe

The Czech Republic, as one of the EU's most industrialized countries, can benefit significantly from technologies like Atlas. Czech industry — particularly automotive — has long struggled with a shortage of skilled labor. According to data from the Czech Statistical Office, domestic companies are short tens of thousands of workers, while the average age of employees in industry is rising.

Microagi focuses on European manufacturers in the automotive, logistics, and food sectors — precisely the industries that are key to the Czech economy. A platform that enables a factory to deploy robots without dependency on a single supplier could accelerate robotization even in medium-sized Czech enterprises that cannot afford to build their own robotic infrastructure.

Microagi's research center in Zurich, within reach of ETH Zurich and the Technical University of Munich, also creates a European counterweight to the Californian robotics hub. For Czech engineers and researchers in robotics, this could mean new opportunities closer to home.