On June 11, 2026, Barcelona-based robotics startup Theker announced an $85 million Series A led by U.S. venture firm CRV, with participation from Samsung and Aglaé Ventures, the investment vehicle of LVMH’s Bernard Arnault. The company calls it “Europe’s largest ever robotics Series A” — and TechCrunch, checking its own records, could not find a counterexample.
The interesting part is the number itself. Co-founder Carla Gómez Cano admits the team originally set out to raise $30–40 million and ended up with more than double that. What investors fought to get into was a robot that deliberately specializes in nothing.
Europe’s Largest Robotics Series A
The round moves Theker onto a different footing. Less than a year earlier, in July 2025, the company closed an €18 million (roughly $21 million) seed round — the largest ever recorded in Spain — led by Kibo Ventures with participation from Kfund’s Leadwind fund. Inditex, the parent of Zara, came in as a strategic investor and a customer at the same time.
The new money is earmarked for scale. The team, currently a few dozen people, is slated to grow to roughly 120 by the end of the year — the company says it has already received 15,000 job applications. Beyond its showroom in central Barcelona, Theker plans new locations across Europe, the U.S., and Asia. And despite the pull of bigger robotics ecosystems, the founders are staying put in Barcelona; Gómez Cano insists location “has never been a barrier to acceleration for us.”
Modular, Not Humanoid
While most star robotics companies bet on fixed-form humanoids in the mold of Boston Dynamics’ Atlas, Theker took the opposite path: modularity. Hands, arms, and the machine’s overall form can be swapped or resized per task. Gómez Cano’s framing is blunt: “If you always have to put the same cookie in the same box, that works perfectly, but most processes aren’t like that.”
Theker’s robots combine vision, control systems, and large language models to target exactly those messy, non-repetitive steps: sorting packages in warehouses, folding and packing clothing, handling bottles and cans. The company has co-authored research with Meta AI and ServiceNow on InCoRo, a control framework that uses LLMs and in-context learning so robots can adapt on the fly at the site. Commercially, it sells through a Robotics-as-a-Service subscription, with a long-term plan to push beyond retail logistics into heavier manufacturing.
Why Now: Labor Shortages and Market Math
Labor shortages in manufacturing and logistics are the immediate driver, and the market forecasts point the same way: the retail robotics segment is projected to grow from $20.12 billion in 2024 to $181.14 billion by 2031, a compound annual growth rate of about 31.6%. The capital heat is not limited to factory floors either — home robots such as Hello Robot’s Stretch 4 are appearing in the same news cycle.
The subscription pricing matters as much as the hardware. Robotics-as-a-Service turns a capital purchase into an operating line item, which is exactly what makes it palatable for the operations budgets Theker sells into — and it gives the startup recurring revenue while its machines learn more tasks on site.
Selling to Operations, Not Innovation Labs
The go-to-market play is just as deliberate as the hardware. Theker skips the corporate innovation-department pilot circuit entirely — the founders say they “didn’t build Theker to run pilots” — and sells directly to logistics and operations teams, the people who own the throughput numbers and the labor gaps. Samsung is not yet a customer, but the two sides are in “advanced discussions,” and Theker would happily have Samsung as a customer, a supplier, and an investor all at once.
For technical teams, the takeaway is that the generality LLMs brought to software is now seeping into physical automation. Compared with rivals betting on the humanoid form factor, “modular hardware plus on-site adaptive learning” may reach the real market of messy processes sooner, because it prices per task instead of per dream. The $85 million round is the market’s latest price tag on that judgment — and with Samsung, the Arnault family vehicle, and Zara’s parent all holding positions, Theker now has a supply chain, a capital base, and a customer bench that most robotics startups its age cannot match.
Sources
- Theker raised $85M to build the factory robot that doesn’t specialize in anything — TechCrunch
- Barcelona’s Theker raised Spain’s largest ever seed round — Novobrief
- Theker
AI-assisted summary compiled from the sources above, reviewed by a human before publishing.