THEKER, the Barcelona-based AI robotics company building AI-native generalist robots for industrial production environments, today announced a €73 million ($85 million) round to accelerate deployments with tier-one industrial operators, deepen its proprietary AI and robotics stack, and expand its team across software, electronics, mechanical engineering and deployments.
The round was led by CRV, with participation from Samsung, LVMH, Cathay Innovation, 20VC, Henkel Ventures, Korelya and Bright Pixel Capital (Sonae) alongside existing investors.
“We didn’t build THEKER to run pilots. We built it to ship robots that work the day they arrive and continue improving every day after. This round accelerates a vision we’ve been building toward from day one: making intelligent, adaptable robotics practical for real industrial operations at global scale,” says Carla Gómez Cano, co-founder of THEKER
THEKER’s raise also sits alongside significant investments in robotics and industrial automation financings reported by this year. Germany’s RobCo, which closed €100 million to expand modular AI-driven robotic manufacturing systems. Stuttgart-based Sereact raised a €93 million Series B in April to scale its physical AI robotics platform across the US, and Norway/US-based Trener Robotics secured €26 million Series A to expand its industrial AI automation and robot skills platform.
“THEKER is solving one of the most important challenges in robotics: bringing general-purpose AI into real production environments where reliability, adaptability and scale actually matter,
“What Carla, Jiaqiang and the team have built is exceptionally rare, a deeply technical platform paired with real commercial deployment momentum. We believe THEKER has the potential to become one of the defining robotics companies of this generation,” added Reid Christian, general partner at CRV
The financing comes less than a year after THEKER closed the largest seed round in Spanish startup history, underscoring the extraordinary speed at which the company has moved from breakthrough technology to real-world industrial deployment.
The round also marks one of CRV’s first investments in Spain, Samsung’s first-ever investment in a Spanish company, and LVMH’s first investment in the Spanish startup ecosystem.
Founded by robotics and AI engineers Carla Gómez Cano and Jiaqiang Ye Zhu, THEKER aims to build a new category of industrial robotics: AI-native generalist robots capable of adapting in real time to changing environments, mixed SKUs, irregular shapes and operational variability without manual reprogramming.
Unlike traditional industrial robots that are rigid, task-specific and costly to reconfigure, THEKER’s says its systems deploy in days, continuously learn in production and operate autonomously in the complexity of real industrial environments.
Already deployed inside live production operations across Europe, THEKER’s robots are designed to help industrial operators increase throughput, reduce downtime and address persistent labor shortages across manufacturing, logistics and retail environments.
The company’s says its rapid traction reflects a broader shift happening across robotics and AI. While advances in foundational AI models have made the idea of generalist robotics possible, few companies globally have successfully bridged the gap between research demonstrations and robots capable of operating reliably in real-world production environments at scale.
