In a military-style hangar on the outskirts of Zurich, a young man wearing a suit and sunglasses rallies the crowd: “Let’s get ready to rumbleeeeeeeeee.” Then he turns to two humanoid robots: “Fight like your lives depend on it, boys.”
This was the scene last weekend at the first robot-on-robot boxing bout in Europe, and I was as giddy as anyone, phone aloft and recording.
The sunglasses-wearing referee/announcer is Declan Shine, the 24-year-old president of the ETH Robotics Club at ETH Zurich, the country's leading technical university.
The fight — which mimicked similar ones that have gone viral in San Francisco — was your classic boxing setup, just with two extra bodies (human) in the ring, wearing headsets and directing the robots with video game controllers.
A weird feeling before the bell: I was worried about the robots getting hurt. This was surprising as these bots are far from cuddly. Developed by Chinese robotics company Unitree, they have a cold blue light where you'd expect a face. They’re trim but oddly vulnerable, prone to wandering into corners with a kind of sheepish confusion.
The students around me were already plotting side hustles for when robot boxing goes mainstream. “We’ll need a way to cool the robots down. Not with a damp towel obviously but with some photonics, bro”, said one. Another floated betting on robot fights. “If we had a Polymarket on this, it’d be so awesome.”
In the ring, the red robot had the better of its blue counterpart, which at one point fell and started twisting like a fish on land. "I think he's out for the count," Shine told the crowd.
A short break for repairs gave him a moment to hand the mic to a sponsor. "Please don't break them — we need them in Belgium next week," came the plea.
‘What’s happening here is fricking awesome’
It doesn't feel like hyperbole to call Switzerland one of the most exciting places in the world to work in robotics right now.
What Shine and co are doing at the robotics club — which meets weekly to tinker around, race drones and plot startups — is indicative of that. In the 48 hours before the bout he was also running a hackathon involving 50 students competing for $10k in prize money from OpenAI, Hugging Face and General Catalyst.
“What’s happened here in the past 12 months is fricking awesome,” said Robin Dechant, partner at VC firm General Catalyst and a hackathon jury member. He was joined on the jury by Alex Stöckl, founder of Zurich-based early-stage VC Founderful, and Leandro von Werra, Hugging Face’s head of research.
The robotics club's sponsor list says a lot about how the tech world views Zurich right now: backers include Nvidia, OpenAI and Tesla. Another sponsor, Swiss delivery robot maker Rivr, had been acquired by Amazon just days earlier.
VCs are also wasting no time placing their bets. Since the start of 2025 there have been 12 robotics deals in Zurich, according to Sifted data, more than any other city in Europe. Though overall VC funding going into the sector in the Swiss city is behind places like Cambridge, Munich and Paris, it’s seen as a prime place to go deal hunting.
ETH Zurich, which is one of the top universities in Europe for spinouts, is seen as a core part of that. Companies to have spun out of the school include ANYbotics, a maker of industrial inspection robots, Mimic Robotics, which is developing humanoid robot hands and Flink Robotics, which is working on robotic solutions for material handling in logistics.
The hackathon
The fight wasn’t the only reason the students had spent the weekend in the hangar: there was a hackathon to be won too.
Eight teams were tasked with getting robots to do cool things, which resulted in a vaguely frantic pre-pitch atmosphere and a lot of students sweating over HDMI connections. An adjoining room in the hanger was full of inflatable mattresses, though I was told there had been very little sleep the previous night, certainly not while techno was blasting at 3am.
For two hours before the fight, we heard pitches. One team instructed their humanoid robot to perform a marriage proposal. It dropped heavily onto one knee — like a superhero landing in a film. "Aggressive proposal," a student observed. Another team had rigged their robot to take instructions via WhatsApp.
The eventual winners stayed up until 3am patiently training their robot to lift cans of Coke. By demo time it could do it reliably — before immediately dropping the can.
Not every robot played along. Some students struggled to get a response at all. "These cost between $100k and $300k," Shine noted, shortly before one bot got confused and reversed into a wall. When not in action, the robots hung from winches like captives.
One team pitched a future where robots carry shopping for elderly relatives — hard to imagine today, when humanoids require someone to teleoperate them. One solution: make the robot understand speech or pointing. The demo one didn't budge.
"He was a good boy yesterday," the pitcher said, frowning. A small detail: the robots were almost always treated as male — either pets ("good boy") or one of the lads ("hey man, chill out").
Shine kept perspective: "Getting a robot to do anything in 48 hours is outstanding." One jury member agreed, with some relief. "Maybe the future isn't arriving as quickly as we thought."
The most mesmerising bot was the one not in competition. In the kitchen next to the hangar’s main hall, a crepe-making robot — roughly the size of a fridge — held a small crowd rapt all day, turning out over 100 crepes without a single failure.
"I always thought robots should make people happy," said its Basel-based inventor, Robert Hennig, who only began building it last August. This wasn't a robot of the future, it's ready for the workforce now.
As the demos wrapped up, a man next to me mentioned that he'd graduated in robotics in 2022 — just before the whole field shifted beneath him.
"2022 was a tipping point when ChatGPT came out," he said. "What I see here would have been unrecognisable in my time at uni."
'Unleash the beast in you'
Back in the ring, the blue robot was ready for retirement after his first round knockout. A full tournament would have to wait.
Even so, I see a bright future for robot boxing, provided the price of these machines drops considerably. It should be a novelty outing, like going to see monster trucks.
As for the students in the room, I'd be amazed if some of them weren't the next founders to watch. Their confidence was striking.
"We're the ones who will build the next unicorns," said Florian Schroeders, cofounder of RoboTUM, the robotics club at the Technical University of Munich. Shine, in particular, has the energy of someone who could be Europe's answer to Sam Altman (with more charisma).
As the bout wound down, the sunglasses-wearing president was shifting into guru mode, urging everyone to keep the party going — "unleash the beast in you!" — before signing off with a rallying cry to "make Europe great again."
