THEKER raises €73 million Series A for AI factory robots, claiming a European record

THEKER, a Barcelona-based AI robotics company, has raised €73 million ($85 million) in a Series A it says is the largest ever for a European robotics company. The round, announced June 11, 2026, was led by CRV and backs robots the startup says are already running in live European production environments.

The investor list is notable beyond the headline figure. The round marks one of CRV's first investments in Spain and drew Samsung's first-ever investment in a Spanish company and LVMH's first investment in the Spanish ecosystem, the round's lead and co-investors said. Cathay Innovation, 20VC, Henkel Ventures, Korelya, and Bright Pixel Capital also took part alongside existing backers.

What THEKER is building sets it apart from single-purpose factory automation. Co-founded by Carla Gómez Cano and Jiaqiang Ye Zhu, the company makes AI-native generalist industrial robots that can adapt in real time to changing tasks — mixed SKUs, irregular shapes, operational variability — without manual reprogramming, according to the funding announcement, targeting manufacturing, logistics, and retail. Reid Christian, a general partner at CRV, said the team has built 'real commercial deployment momentum.'

The claim of a European record comes from THEKER and its investors and has not been independently verified; the same goes for the deployment figures, which come from the company rather than its customers. THEKER also says the round follows what it calls the largest seed round in Spanish startup history, closed less than a year earlier.

Generalist robots that adapt on the fly remain a hard engineering problem, and live deployment at small scale is not the same as proven reliability across factories. Still, the size of the raise and the mix of strategic backers — a chipmaker, a luxury group, and a US venture firm — signal growing investor appetite for European robotics built around adaptable, AI-driven hardware.