Investor makes a case for Europe as a new frontier for physical AI

These startups are attracting critical capital and company patrons too.

Analysis establishments in Europe present a gentle pipeline of innovation. Supply: FOV Ventures

ANYbotics AG raised roughly $60M to commercialize its quadruped robots. Sevensense Robotics, an ETH vision-guided robotics spin-off, was acquired by ABB in 2024. Whereas Oxbridge’s analysis gave beginning to WaveOptics (acquired by Snap for $500M) and Latent Logic (bought by Waymo in 2019).

College spin-offs now command roughly one-fifth of Europe’s deep-tech VC {dollars}, because of robust technical founding groups and guarded IP.

This experience clusters geographically in ways in which create compounding benefits. France boasts world-class AI labs (INRIA, Paris-Saclay) spawning leaders like Prophesee and Mistral AI. Switzerland’s ETH Zurich produces a gentle stream of robotics and pc imaginative and prescient spin-offs, together with our portfolio firm nunu ai, and has R&D places of work from Google, Apple, and NVIDIA.

We’ve seen it up shut in our personal portfolio. Flow Computing emerged from VTT Technical Research Center of Finland, based by researchers alongside a business veteran. Movement is constructing a chip structure to speed up parallel computing, important for powering real-time AI in bodily programs.

The ecosystem can be maturing past first-time college spin-offs. Skilled founders are launching new ventures with deeper technical experience and stronger business networks. Urho Konttori based Distance Technologies after main Varjo’s digital actuality (VR) growth. Harri Valpola launched System 2 AI after promoting Curious AI and spending three years at Apple. This sample creates corporations with higher technical foundations and clearer business methods.

Now, European startups are constructing throughout the deep tech stack for nearly each sector, fixing real-world issues in factories, warehouses, hospitals, farms, and households.

Europe presents real-world purposes, real-world urgency

The true check of a technological revolution isn’t the way it performs in a clear room, however the way it handles a development web site, a hospital ward, or a battlefield. Europe’s aggressive edge in robotics stems from its standing because the world’s “residing laboratory” — a various panorama of asset-heavy industries hungry for automation.

By grounding AI within the messy actuality of the bodily world, European startups are transferring past the novelty of humanoid analysis to unravel the pressing demographic and labor crises of the following decade.

Industrial settings

Startups develop robots and automation aiming to make manufacturing extra versatile or to help human staff on the manufacturing unit flooring. Europe’s robust manufacturing base and analysis in industrial automation have spawned many ventures in collaborative robots and robotic cells for small and midsize enterprises (SME)s.

Take our portfolio firm Makiina, pioneering modular, low-cost, AI-driven robotic programs constructed from scratch in Finland. Designed to study duties by way of human demonstration, they make adaptable automation viable far past manufacturing unit flooring.

Makiina’s crew is constructing adaptable automation. Supply: FOV Ventures

Agriculture

Agriculture faces comparable stress from farm labor shortages and calls for for sustainable practices. European startups construct robots for planting, crop care, harvesting, and farm administration. Europe’s combine of enormous industrial farms and smaller specialty farms supplies a testing floor for subject robotics reminiscent of weeding machines, harvesters for vegatables and fruits, and drones or rovers for monitoring crops.

Many agri-robotics startups emphasize environmental advantages like precision weeding to scale back pesticide use. Our portfolio firm Spogen is constructing a voice and vision-guided co-pilot that helps operators work together with advanced equipment like tractors utilizing pure language. Assume Alexa working on diesel with metal tracks.

Development

Development has been comparatively late to automation, however European startups are rising to deal with heavy labor duties and productiveness points. These corporations construct robots for development websites, together with robotic programs for on-site materials dealing with, automated development processes, and surveying and monitoring. Europe’s development robotics scene is nascent however rising, typically leveraging partnerships with development companies.

Healthcare

Healthcare faces demographic realities together with ageing populations and workers shortages that make robotic options pressing. Europe is residence to a number of main medical robotics startups, notably in surgical robotics and rehabilitation.

The continent has produced notable challengers to Intuitive Surgical‘s dominant da Vinci system, together with Switzerland’s LEM Surgical and U.Okay.-based CMR Surgical with its Versius system. Focus areas embody minimally invasive surgical assistants, robotic endoscopy, prosthetics and exoskeletons, and micro-robots for focused therapies.

Precision and security purposes

Protection represents one other space the place Europe’s deep tech edge issues for each nationwide safety and dual-use innovation that spills into civilian business. Portfolio firm Distance Technologies exhibits how this works. Based by two Nokia veterans who beforehand constructed Varjo into a frontrunner in enterprise and defence-focused VR headsets, they acknowledged the {hardware} barrier stopping mass adoption.

They’re now combining {hardware}, software program, and AI to create mild fields and pictures that seem naturally inside your subject of view at appropriate depth and distance in the actual world. The corporate’s expertise serves each automotive and protection markets, showing on automobile windshields or in fighter jets. Europe wants extra dual-use startups that thread the needle between nationwide resilience and business scale.

Distance Applied sciences serves each protection and civilian markets. Supply: FOV Ventures

Past these vertical purposes, heavy funding flows towards general-purpose humanoid robots and programs with human-like options reminiscent of two arms. Europe has a legacy of humanoid robotics analysis, together with Italy’s iCub open-source humanoid and NASA and ESA collaborations.

A number of startups are actually pushing towards business humanoids, together with 1X initially from Norway.

These purposes throughout robotics share a basic requirement. Machines want to grasp area, depth, and bodily context. That brings us to Europe’s second structural benefit in spatial computing.

Spatial computing is Europe’s hidden superpower

We’re transferring previous the period of taking a look at information on screens to an period the place people and machines inhabit the identical area.

The “engine room” of this revolution is firmly rooted in Europe. The continent has spent a long time perfecting the core disciplines — optics, photonics, and real-time rendering – lengthy earlier than “spatial computing” was a buzzword.

This technical basis wasn’t constructed for headsets, but it surely trickled down from Helsinki’s gaming studios, Swiss optics labs, and the telecommunications labs of Nokia and Ericsson. In the present day, that DNA powers the whole spatial stack. Actual-time 3D video games engines like Unity and Unreal, have been repurposed because the working programs for actuality. They now run the simulations for our navy, the coaching grounds for our robots, and the “digital twins” of our autonomous autos.

These engines have transitioned from leisure instruments to the important infrastructure for understanding bodily area.

As these simulated environments grow to be extra advanced, the business bottleneck has shifted from merely constructing 3D worlds to capturing the present world at scale. European innovators are breaking this barrier by way of breakthroughs like Gaussian splatting and image diffusion, with corporations like M-XR and Graswald making high-fidelity 3D content material era near-instant and hyper-realistic.

Nevertheless, capturing actuality solely issues if the {hardware} is sensible sufficient for on a regular basis use. That is the place European startups are fixing the “physics issues” of miniaturization, with Kubos Semiconductor reinventing microLEDs for effectivity, and IXI perfecting electronically tunable lenses that mimic the human eye’s pure focus.

The strategic worth of this expertise has triggered a world acquisition wave. Within the lead-up to the 2024 Imaginative and prescient Professional launch, almost half of Apple’s focused acquisitions had been European-based, whereas Snap’s $500 million buy of WaveOptics underscored the area’s dominance in waveguide expertise.

We are actually witnessing a complicated “third wave” of innovation reminiscent of Oura, valued at $11 billion, with Europe’s heritage in optics and pc imaginative and prescient the indispensable substrate for the following interface layer of computing.

The case for European tech sovereignty

This focus of high-value experience is shifting the dialog round European technological sovereignty from a philosophical debate right into a sensible technique for proudly owning a digital future.

Decreasing the long-standing reliance on overseas cloud suppliers and {hardware} producers permits Europe to construct homegrown capabilities that mirror its personal industrial requirements. This transition ensures that the vital applied sciences shaping the long run keep rooted in native values whereas sustaining management over important information and infrastructure. There’s a large alternative to guide within the subject of bodily AI by defining the core ideas of the business alongside the merchandise themselves.

Take drone motors and actuators. Chinese language companies management 70% to 90% of the worldwide business drone market, and European protection forces are aware of the dependency (up to 70% of parts in Ukrainian battlefield drones come from Chinese language suppliers).

European-made alternate options exist however usually price 10x extra, making reshoring economically unviable. Our portfolio firm Makiina is constructing drone motors and actuators solely in-house in Finland, producing dual-arm robotic programs for below $1,200 with motors that early benchmarking suggests match Chinese language alternate options on each torque and value.

If these economics maintain at scale, it might symbolize extra than simply sovereign provide chains — it’s a platform for actually European robots, constructed with European components, designed for European deployment.

The present coverage panorama presents a singular benefit for this transition. European AI regulation supplies a steady framework that really favors industrial innovation.

As a result of bodily AI depends on sensor information from factories and warehouses relatively than delicate client data, it naturally avoids many widespread privateness hurdles. This might permit builders to give attention to security and interoperability with out the friction usually related to private information. An organization can innovate inside a logistics hub or a producing plant whereas staying completely aligned with present standards.

Public funding and institutional help are actually accelerating these efforts by way of high-impact initiatives. New cross-border testbeds for autonomous drones and digital hubs for robotics are serving to to de-risk early deployments for startups.

These efforts are additional supported by the introduction of “EU Inc,” a authorized framework meant to assist startups to scale throughout the whole bloc below a single firm construction. This technique removes the executive complexity that traditionally fragmented the European market and slowed down the expansion of deep tech companies.

EU Inc is meant to assist startups scale throughout Europe. Supply: FOV Ventures

The sensible impression of this structural shift is important for any firm coping with bodily {hardware}. A robotics startup can now check machines in German factories and deploy software program in French warehouses whereas hiring analysis expertise in Poland by way of one authorized entity.

This streamlined strategy simplifies funding buildings and hastens cross-border progress by harmonising operations throughout the one market. These adjustments are creating a transparent path for a brand new era of sovereign tech giants to rise from the lab and compete on the worldwide stage.

We imagine that is essentially the most thrilling time to again European deep tech founders in a long time, as a result of the convergence is right here — areas as soon as thought-about futuristic like AI, robotics, and spatial computing are reaching maturity collectively. As well as, the urgency is actual and the infrastructure is catching up.

Europe has a transparent edge by way of engineering depth, industrial heritage and cross-border collaboration, and that is lastly aligned with what the world wants most to reap real-world advantages from AI: intelligence within the bodily world.

On March 24, FOV Ventures is bringing collectively Europe’s main robotics founders, traders, and operators in London for Vantage Point: Robotics Edition — a half-day showcase and summit for the groups constructing embodied intelligence into the actual world. In case you’re constructing on this area, we’d like to see you there.

In regards to the writer

David Ripert is enterprise accomplice at FOV Ventures. France-born Ripert held world management roles at Google and Netflix earlier than founding AR platform Poplar. He has a mixture of C-level, operator, and angel investing expertise.

This text is reposted with permission.