Theker Raises $85M in Europe's Largest-Ever Robotics Series A to Build Robots That Can Change Their Own Arms

The race to automate the factory floor has a new European contender with deep-pocketed backers and an unusual thesis: instead of building a robot that does one thing perfectly, build one that can do almost anything adequately — and change what it does between shifts.

Theker, a Barcelona-based AI robotics startup, has raised $85 million in a Series A round that the company and its investors are calling the largest in European robotics history. The round was led by US venture firm CRV, with strategic participation from Samsung and Aglaé Ventures, the investment vehicle of French luxury conglomerate LVMH. Existing investors including Inditex — the parent company of Zara — and Kibo Ventures also participated, alongside Cathay Innovation, 20VC, Henkel Ventures, and Bright Pixel Capital.

The Problem With Robots That Only Do One Thing

The prevailing model for industrial automation is still the single-purpose machine. Automotive plants have welding robots that weld and only weld. Fulfillment centers have picking arms calibrated to specific bin sizes and product dimensions. The capital cost of redeploying these systems for different tasks is often prohibitive — and in practice, most companies simply don’t bother, accepting the inflexibility as the price of automation.

This model works when products and processes are highly consistent over long periods of time. It breaks down badly when they aren’t.

“If you always have to put the same cookie in the same box, that works perfectly,” said Carla Gómez Cano, Theker’s co-founder. “Most processes aren’t like that.”

Gómez Cano, along with co-founder Jiaqiang Ye Zhu, built Theker to attack the segment of industrial work that automation has historically left behind: the messy middle. Tasks like sorting packages of varying sizes and weights, packing different clothing SKUs for different retail destinations, and handling food and beverage products with irregular shapes and fragile surfaces. These processes change frequently — sometimes seasonally, sometimes week to week — and rigid automation falls apart the moment the input changes.

Reconfigurable Hardware as a Competitive Moat

Theker’s technical differentiation lies in what the company calls reconfigurable hardware. Unlike humanoid robots or fixed-arm systems, Theker’s machines are modular: hands, arms, and overall body form can be physically swapped or resized based on the task at hand. A robot handling small-batch garment packing in the morning can be reconfigured by the afternoon shift to handle beverage canning with entirely different grip and load requirements.

This is fundamentally different from the software-first reconfigurability that most robotics startups pursue. Programming a robot to do something new takes time; physically changing what the robot’s body can reach, grip, and lift takes minutes and requires no reprogramming. Theker’s bet is that this hardware flexibility, combined with AI trained on the resulting task diversity, produces a robot that is genuinely generalist in a way that software alone cannot achieve.

The AI layer handles perception, motion planning, and quality control. The company trains its models on data collected from actual production environments — not simulation — which it argues produces robots that handle real-world variation far better than systems trained primarily in virtual settings.

Strategic Investors Signal Industrial Intent

The composition of Theker’s investor syndicate is as revealing as the round size. Samsung’s participation places the world’s largest consumer electronics manufacturer — which also runs some of the most complex contract manufacturing operations on earth — in direct strategic alignment with a company building the robots that might one day populate its factories. The relationship is described as being in “advanced discussions” on the customer side, stopping short of a formal deployment agreement.

LVMH’s involvement through Aglaé Ventures reflects a different strategic logic. The luxury group manages production of extraordinarily diverse high-end goods — from handbags to cognac bottles to cosmetics — where batch sizes are small, quality requirements are exacting, and the cost of damaging product is high. Rigid automation has historically been a poor fit for this kind of production. Theker’s reconfigurable model addresses that gap directly.

Perhaps most significant is the continued backing of Inditex. Zara’s parent company processes over 450 million garments annually across dozens of markets, with fashion cycles that have compressed from two seasons per year to near-continuous design refreshes. The company’s logistics and fulfillment operations are among the most demanding in global retail, and Inditex’s early bet on Theker as both investor and customer gives the startup a reference account that few European robotics companies have matched.

Europe’s Robotics Gap — and Why Barcelona

For years, European robotics has lagged the United States and Japan in both investment and deployment. Germany’s industrial heritage produced legacy robot integrators, but the venture-backed, AI-native robotics wave that produced companies like Figure AI, Physical Intelligence, and Apptronik has been overwhelmingly American.

Theker’s $85 million round — which follows what the company describes as a record European robotics seed round raised less than a year prior — may signal a shift. The Barcelona startup has built a team of robotics engineers, AI researchers, and manufacturing specialists drawn from across Europe and Asia, competing directly with US companies for technical talent.

Barcelona specifically has emerged as an unlikely hub for robotics and deep tech in Europe, benefiting from strong connections to technical universities, relatively affordable operating costs compared to London or Zurich, and proximity to Inditex’s Galician manufacturing base.

The Revenue Model: Skip the Pilots

One of Theker’s most explicit strategic choices is what it doesn’t do: pilot programs. Many robotics startups spend months in proof-of-concept deployments that delay revenue, consume engineering resources, and often fail to convert into commercial contracts. Theker has structured its go-to-market to target logistics and operations buyers — rather than R&D or innovation departments — where purchasing decisions are tied to unit economics and where successful deployments generate immediate recurring revenue.

The company operates a showroom facility in Barcelona where potential customers can run their specific production tasks on Theker hardware before signing contracts. This shortens the evaluation cycle significantly compared to the typical robotics procurement process, where site visits, integration studies, and safety certifications can stretch for more than a year.

The Series A funding will be used to accelerate deployments with tier-one industrial operators, expand Theker’s AI and robotics stack, and grow headcount across software, electronics, mechanical engineering, and deployment teams. The company is planning expansion across Europe, the United States, and Asia in the next 18 months.

The Broader Inflection

Theker’s raise arrives at a moment of unusual intensity in physical AI investment. Industrial automation spending globally is accelerating as manufacturers in developed economies contend with persistent labor shortages, supply chain localization pressures, and margin compression that makes human labor increasingly uneconomical for repetitive tasks.

The question the company must answer over the next few years is whether reconfigurable hardware at scale can match the throughput and reliability of dedicated fixed automation. If Theker can demonstrate 95%+ uptime and competitive cycle times across diverse task types, it will have cracked a manufacturing problem that has resisted automated solutions for decades — and earned every dollar of its record-breaking round.