According to Sifted, European robotics startups have raised €1.1 billion across 104 deals in 2024, already matching last year’s deal count with €339 million more in funding. Mimic Robotics recently secured a $16 million seed round led by Elaia and Speedinvest to develop dexterous robotic hands that can handle delicate tasks like picking up croissants and preparing coffee. The funding surge is driven by converging factors including dramatically cheaper hardware costs, improved AI models post-ChatGPT, and the accumulation of large robotics datasets. Companies like Mimic are developing foundation models trained on human task recordings, while Stuttgart-based Sereact launched Cortex, a vision-language-action model trained on what it claims is the world’s largest robotics dataset. This momentum comes as Germany’s manufacturing sector faces a projected 5 million worker shortage by 2030, putting $630 billion in output at risk. The European robotics landscape is rapidly evolving as AI capabilities transform what’s possible.
The Physical AI Revolution Takes Shape
What we’re witnessing is the long-awaited convergence of AI breakthroughs with physical world applications. For years, robotics progress was hampered by the limitations of both hardware costs and software intelligence. The transformer architecture that revolutionized language models is now being applied to physical tasks through models like diffusion policy approaches that enable robots to learn complex, multi-step actions. This represents a fundamental shift from programmed robotics to learned robotics, where machines can adapt to environmental changes in real-time rather than following rigid, predetermined paths.
Europe’s Strategic Imperative
The robotics resurgence comes at a critical moment for European manufacturing competitiveness. With aging workforces and projected labor shortages threatening hundreds of billions in economic output, automation is no longer optional. However, Europe faces a strategic dilemma: whether to build domestic champions or risk ceding ground to well-funded American competitors. The recent sale of ABB’s robotics unit to SoftBank highlights this vulnerability. European VCs traditionally favor traction-focused investments over pure technology bets, which could limit the continent’s ability to compete in foundational robotics model development against US companies like Skild AI and Physical Intelligence that have raised hundreds of millions.
Data: The New Robotics Bottleneck
While hardware costs have decreased dramatically thanks to commoditization driven by Chinese manufacturing, the new constraint has become robotics-specific training data. Unlike language models that can train on publicly available text corpora, robotics models require specialized datasets of physical interactions. This creates both a barrier to entry and a potential competitive moat for companies that successfully accumulate proprietary datasets. The emergence of companies like Sereact with claims of the “world’s largest robotics dataset” suggests we’re entering an era where data acquisition strategies will be as important as algorithmic innovation in robotics.
The Adoption Challenge Ahead
Despite the technological progress and funding enthusiasm, European robotics faces a critical adoption challenge. Historical resistance to automation among European manufacturers remains a significant barrier. The continent’s manufacturing sector has been notoriously slow to embrace robotics compared to Asian counterparts, often preferring incremental automation over transformative changes. This cultural resistance, combined with Europe’s fragmented market of small-to-medium enterprises, creates adoption friction that could slow the deployment of these advanced systems even as the technology matures.
Where European Robotics Goes Next
Looking ahead 12-24 months, we’ll likely see consolidation as the current funding wave separates viable technologies from hype. The companies that succeed will be those that solve immediate industrial pain points while building toward more general capabilities. Mimic’s focus on dexterous hands for existing assembly lines represents this pragmatic approach. However, the ultimate test will be whether Europe can produce a “Mistral of robotics” – a foundational player that can compete globally rather than just serving regional needs. This will require both continued VC appetite for ambitious technology bets and customer willingness to be early adopters of transformative automation solutions.
