Stuttgart-based robotics company Sereact has raised a $110m Series B led by Headline, with participation from Bullhound Capital, Felix Capital and Daphni.
Robotics is on a tear in Europe at the moment. In 2025, European robotics startups more than doubled the amount of funding they received from the year before to €1.45bn. After the first quarter of this year, they’ve already raised €522m.
Sereact, which has raised over $140 million to date, is developing a vision-language-action (VLA) model, dubbed Cortex, capable of plugging into any robot — including those in warehouses used for picking and packing, the company’s first use case.
Existing investors Air Street Capital, Creandum and Point Nine also backed the company.
With the fresh funding it plans to develop Cortex 2, an updated model which combines a VLA with a world model, which are systems designed to understand the physical world and an area where some think Europe could win.
Unlike the first iteration of its model, which was restricted to “seeing” and picking objects, Cortex 2 is built on reasoning and can adapt to a changing environment.
New use cases include assembling a component under tension, placing a windshield wiper on a vehicle without scratching it and positioning parts in the right place in a multi-station work flow.
More than 200 Sereact systems are already live across Europe, all running on its model. The company has completed more than 1bn real production picks for customers including BMW, Daimler Truck and PepsiCo.
"We bet early that you can't build real robotics AI in a lab," says cofounder and CEO Ralf Gulde.
"You build it with a data flywheel fed by real deployments, shipping into production, living with the failures and letting the model learn from what actually happens on the floor.”
The money will also be used to expand into the US, where Sereact will open its first office, in Boston, with plans to hire commercial, application and engineering staff on the ground there.
