Robco Crosses $1B Valuation as It Expands Autonomous Industrial Robots

Congratulations to Roman Hölzl and the entire 225-person Robco team on crossing the $1B valuation mark. The milestone comes from an employee secondary sale, funded by existing and new investors.

Robco has offices in Munich, San Francisco and Austin. It has now deployed more than 1,000 autonomous industrial robots for global customers such as BMW, Koenig & Bauer and Gartenfrisch Jung, and those robots have logged more than 3.5 million hours in the field.

Promus Ventures was privileged to invest once again in the Company and has invested in every round since our first investment in the Series A in 2022. Robco has raised more than $200M to date, most recently a $100M Series C round (which we wrote about here). Sequoia and Lightspeed are among the other existing investors participating, alongside several new ones.

Robco is doubling down on the United States. Customer operations now span more than a dozen states, and Roman has relocated here to oversee the expansion. The Company has built manufacturing and assembly operations in Austin and a research lab in San Francisco.

Robco has also purpose-built a robot named Alfie for its industrial lifecycle. Alfie is the Company's answer to the 80-90% of manufacturing labor tasks still done by hand. Teaching a robot to repeat one task is the easy part (relatively speaking). Robco built its proprietary AI into each robot so it learns from its errors, corrects in real time and gets more productive with each task.

Promus Ventures has offices in the US and EU and invests in DeepTech and Physical AI startups on both sides of the Atlantic. Robco shows how this works in practice. We partner with best-of-breed teams in space, robotics and AI, then put our network to work across functions and geographies as they scale.

Robotics has been part of our portfolio since we started the firm in 2012. Today our robotics portfolio includes Mytra, Lunar Outpost, Chef Robotics and numerous others. We've watched the number of Physical AI and robotics startups increase dramatically over the last several years.

Labor has always been a big lever on industrial costs. The bigger productivity gains from autonomous systems like Robco's come from solving the other hard problems in manufacturing, including intelligence, component pricing and safety. We are seeing that play out across our portfolio.

Watch Roman's Bloomberg interview on Robco and the new valuation here, and read the Company's press release here.

Congrats again to Roman and the team. We're proud to be along for the ride and look forward to supporting the Company for years to come.

More on Promus Ventures:

Promus Ventures invests in early-stage deep tech startups solving complex problems to advance everyday lives across the world. Some of Promus Ventures’ other leading portfolio investments include Rocket Lab (Nasdaq: RKLB), Whoop, Spire (NYSE: SPIR), ICEYE, AngelList, Mapbox, Halter, Mytra, Bellabeat, The Exploration Company, Kensho, Gauss Surgical, Figure Eight, All.Space, and numerous others.

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