Ex-Red Bull engineer lands $55m for robot training data

microagi, a Munich startup founded by former Red Bull Racing aerodynamicist Bercan Kilic, has raised $55m in what it says is the largest seed round ever secured by a German company. Hummingbird led the round, with Northzone, LocalGlobe, Village Global, and redalpine also participating. The company did not disclose its valuation.

What microagi is building is more specific than the size of the round suggests. It does not make robots, and it does not build foundation models. Instead, it records workers with cameras and sensor-equipped gloves, then uses that footage to help existing robotics models learn a specific task inside a specific factory.

Kilic said five companies are already collecting data through the platform, and one is preparing to deploy robots on a production line. Customers span automotive, logistics, and food. He declined to name the model partners.

“We provide the labs with data, they provide us with models, and then we layer on proprietary data to make our customers happy.”

How Shift supplies robot training footage

That approach emerged after microagi originally planned to focus only on deployment, but found that most robotics models were not good enough to work from. The company then built shift, a data collection operation that has already surfaced publicly in unusual ways.

This year, shift went viral by offering free apartment cleanings in New York in exchange for filming cleaners doing chores such as washing dishes, mopping, and folding laundry. This week, it began offering free private chefs in San Francisco. shift now operates in 15 countries and pays more than 20,000 people to record themselves performing physical tasks, then sells that footage to labs developing robotics models.

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Why microagi is betting on labor shortages

The broader pitch rests on a basic problem in robotics: language models were trained on the internet, but robots lack anything comparable. As Ken Goldberg of Berkeley has put it, the gap is about 100,000 years of data.

Kilic argues the timing is driven by demographics as much as technology. China installed 295,000 factory robots in 2024, accounting for 54% of the global total, while the US installed 34,200. In Europe, the EU’s median age reached 44.9 in 2025, up from 39.6 two decades earlier, and the European Commission estimates the bloc could lose 18.8 million workers by 2050.

“If you run factories, the math is already on your desk. Your most experienced people retire this decade, and their replacements were never born. Reshoring only works if the robots do.”

microagi says the new funding will go toward compute, expanding shift’s network, and building a US presence from New York. The company has 37 employees, while shift has about 75. Kilic’s four co-founders include former Mercedes F1 engineer Yoan Iliev and ex-Alan Turing Institute researcher Anton Poletaev.

Kilic said robotics is at its “GPT-2 moment”, with the scaling recipe still unclear but close. For now, microagi has one customer nearing a robot deployment on a factory floor — and a very large wager that better task data will be enough to unlock many more.