SoftBank Leads $500 Million Into Agile Robots at an $8.5 Billion Valuation, With Nvidia and Hitachi in the Round

Agile Robots, the Munich robotics company spun out of the German Aerospace Center in 2018, has raised a $500 million Series F led by SoftBank at an $8.5 billion post-money valuation, with Nvidia, Hitachi and Hitachi Ventures, and T.Capital joining the round. The raise, announced November 12 and reported by Reuters and AFP, brings the company's total invested capital to about $2 billion and makes it, by its own account, Europe's most valuable physical AI robotics firm.

The company is one of the few robotics firms that already operates at industrial scale. It says more than 20,000 of its robot systems are installed worldwide across automotive, consumer electronics, healthcare and logistics customers, backed by more than 650 patents and a workforce of about 3,500 people, over 2,000 of them in research and development. Its product line spans force-controlled robot arms, dexterous hands, mobile robots and humanoids, with deployments reported at customers including BMW, Foxconn and Xiaomi.

Capacity is the headline use of funds. In early 2026 the company opened a production site in Fürstenfeldbruck near Munich rated for up to 10,000 legged and wheeled humanoid robots a year, and CEO Zhaopeng Chen told Reuters he expects 1,000 to 2,000 of its compact humanoid models — aimed at universities and labs — to ship in 2027. The new money is earmarked for US expansion, added production capacity including in Germany, and entry into new markets.

The valuation math is aggressive but not untethered. Agile Robots does not publish revenue, which is itself a data point for a company at this size. Research firm Sacra estimated about $339 million for 2025 and guidance of roughly $690 million for 2026 — which would put the $8.5 billion price at around twelve times forward revenue, according to Forbes. Unofficial figures put the company's last major valuation, in 2021, near $1 billion, meaning the number has grown roughly eightfold in five years.

Nvidia's presence in the round extends a working relationship. At GTC Berlin in October, the two companies jointly unveiled the Agile ONE SN, a 1.4-meter, 40-kilogram research humanoid with 31 degrees of freedom, Jetson Thor compute rated at 2,070 TFLOPS in FP4 and 128 GB of memory, factory-loaded with the Isaac GR00T software stack and scheduled for release in early 2027. The larger Agile ONE platform stands 1.74 meters, weighs 69 kilograms and carries payloads up to 20 kilograms.

The risks are the standard ones for humanoid optimism: unverified shipment counts, an Audi pilot test whose results were never published, and intensifying competition from US and Chinese rivals — Chinese peer Neura Robotics reached a valuation of about $7 billion in June. The EU's new Machinery Regulation takes effect on January 20, 2027, adding compliance work for every robotics vendor selling into Europe. Chen says an IPO is possible but has given no timeline.

What the round really measures is how much capital is now willing to underwrite physical AI as a category rather than as individual product bets. SoftBank leading, with Nvidia buying in at the component-and-software layer and Hitachi at the industrial layer, is a statement that the stack — chips, models, arms, factories — is being financed as one system. For Agile Robots, $8.5 billion is now the bar its factory output has to justify.