A ten-month-old Munich startup whose founders include two Formula 1 engineers has raised what it says is the largest seed round in German history: $55 million for microagi, led by Hummingbird Ventures with Northzone, LocalGlobe, Village Global and Redalpine participating, announced July 16 and first reported by Sifted.
The data play
microagi attacks the bottleneck every humanoid-robot program shares: the scarcity of real-world manipulation data. Its method is bracingly literal — engineers wear head-mounted cameras while performing physical tasks, from industrial sorting to washing dishes, generating first-person demonstration data for training robot policies. In May the company ran a free apartment-cleaning service in New York, trading labor for kitchen-and-clutter data at household scale.
Atlas, the product
The commercial wrapper is a platform called Atlas, which fine-tunes robot foundation models on a factory's own operational data — the pitch being that a generic manipulation model becomes useful only when adapted to a specific plant's parts, fixtures and workflows. It's the physical-AI equivalent of enterprise fine-tuning, sold to manufacturers rather than developers.
The team
The five founders read like a motorsport paddock: CEO Bercan Kilic is a former Red Bull Racing F1 aerodynamicist and one-time professional esports player; Yoan Iliev comes from Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1; Anton Poletaev from the Alan Turing Institute; Nico Nussbaum from RWTH Aachen; and Artjem Weissbeck co-founded the WhatsApp-commerce platform Charles. Valuation was not disclosed.
The moment
Kilic's framing of the raise was European to the bone: "It's one-billionth of what Europe needs." The round lands in a physical-AI funding wave — investors have concluded that embodied AI is the next platform and that data, not actuators, is the scarce asset. That a German seed record now belongs to a robot-data company, not a fintech, says as much about the cycle as the check does.