Investment & Finance

BMW and PepsiCo robotics partner Sereact raises €93 million Series B to scale across the US

Stuttgart-based Sereact, an innovator in physical AI for warehouses and manufacturing, has raised a €93 million ($110 million) Series B round in order to scale their ‘Cortex 2’ offering and to open its first office in the U.S. in Boston at some point during the coming summer – aiming to

  • David Cendon Garcia
  • April 27, 2026
  • 0 Comments

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Stuttgart-based Sereact, an innovator in physical AI for warehouses and manufacturing, has raised a €93 million ($110 million) Series B round in order to scale their ‘Cortex 2’ offering and to open its first office in the U.S. in Boston at some point during the coming summer – aiming to hire new staff locally.

The round was led by Headline, with participation from Bullhound Capital, Daphni, and Felix Capital. Existing investors Air Street Capital, Creandum, and Point Nine once again invested in Sereact. This follows a €25 million Series A round in 2025, as covered by EU-Startups.

We bet early that you can’t build real robotics AI in a lab,” says Ralf Gulde, CEO and co-founder. “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 numbers show it worked. Two hundred systems. One billion picks. One intervention per 53,000. Nobody else is close.”

Sereact’s Series B sits within a sizeable 2026 funding environment for European physical AI, robotics and automation companies, where reported activity across warehouse picking, pallet handling, industrial manufacturing automation, autonomous inspection, robotic manipulation and physical-AI data infrastructure.

*]:pointer-events-auto [content-visibility:auto] supports-[content-visibility:auto]:[contain-intrinsic-size:auto_100lvh] R6Vx5W_threadScrollVars scroll-mb-[calc(var(–scroll-root-safe-area-inset-bottom,0px)+var(–thread-response-height))] scroll-mt-[calc(var(–header-height)+min(200px,max(70px,20svh)))]” dir=”auto” data-turn-id=”request-WEB:2399a420-f6f5-41ac-8e76-1d185456be59-3″ data-testid=”conversation-turn-6″ data-scroll-anchor=”false” data-turn=”assistant”> UK: London-based Stanhope AI raised €6.7 million to develop adaptive AI for robotics and defence applications; London-based Encord raised €50 million to scale AI-native data infrastructure for physical AI systems moving into production; London-based BeyondMath raised €8.4 million to expand its generative physics research and commercial adoption; UK-based Dexory added €9.8 million to its Series C to accelerate product development and expand access to autonomous warehouse-scanning and digital-twin technology; and London-based Isembard raised €43 million to scale software-powered factories for aerospace and energy customers.

  • Elsewhere: Warsaw-based Nomagic raised €8.3 million in a Series B extension to scale its physical AI operations in the US for warehouse and logistics automation; Norway and US-based Trener Robotics secured €26 million in Series A funding to expand its AI robot skills platform for manufacturing; Budapest-based Allonic raised €6 million to industrialise its robotic body manufacturing platform; Heidelberg-based FLEXOO raised €11 million to scale its physical AI sensor platform for battery storage and automotive applications, making it a same-country German comparator for Sereact; and Puglia-based Mirai Robotics raised €3.6 million to build autonomous systems and information intelligence platforms for maritime operations;

    Together, these standalone 2026 EU-Startups articles account for approximately €172.8 million in disclosed funding across warehouse automation, physical AI, industrial robotics, manufacturing automation and enabling data or simulation infrastructure.

    Set against this 2026 peer group, Sereact’s €93 million Series B would be one of the larger disclosed European rounds in the adjacent physical AI, warehouse robotics and industrial automation context. The strongest direct comparables are Nomagic, because of its warehouse robotics and physical AI focus, Trener Robotics, because of its AI skills layer for industrial robots, and Dexory, because of its warehouse intelligence and autonomous scanning positioning.

    Total funding for the mentioned rounds rises to approximately €265.8 million. EU-Startups has also previously covered Sereact itself in a 2025 report on its €25 million Series A, but that earlier article is not included in the 2026-only funding total.

    The robot dreams in latent space. We give it a form of imagination – the ability to anticipate how the world will respond before it moves,” adds Marc Tuscher, co-founder and CTO. “We don’t build robots. We don’t sell services. We ship one thing: the model that runs on any robot. Single arms, dual arms, humanoids, fixed cells – same brain across all of it. Hardware is becoming a commodity. The model isn’t.

    Founded in 2021, Sereact builds AI for robots that work in the physical world. Among its offerings are its Cortex brain, which runs across single-arm picking cells, dual-arm returns stations, humanoid robots; and Sereact Lens, a 3D perception system for inventory and quality control.

    According to the company, warehouses were the first deployment because no other environment provides the same combination of data points: billions of real interactions, every object shape imaginable, hard throughput constraints, and consequences when the robot gets it wrong.

    More than 200 Sereact systems are already live across Europe, allegedly making Sereact the most deployed AI picking robot company in the world. Those systems, all running the Cortex brain, have completed over 1 billion real production picks for customers including Active Ants, Austrian Post, BMW, bol., Daimler Truck, DeltiLog, Mercedes-Benz, Monta, MS Direct, PepsiCo and Rohlik Group.

    The physical AI opportunity is one of the largest we’ve seen in a generation, and we believe it will rewire global supply chains and manufacturing. Behind great opportunities and great companies are great founders, and Ralf and Marc are building into that opportunity the right way: real deployments, real data, and a model that compounds and gets better with every single pick.

    “Customers love the product, which leads to continued expansion, only accelerating the data flywheel – this is why we are so excited to back Sereact,” says Trevor Neff, Growth Partner at Headline .

    Cortex 2 augments a vision-language-action (VLA) with a world model. It runs possible actions against a learned model of physics and object behaviour, picks the one most likely to work, and updates in real time as the scene changes.

    Sereact says that the shift from reacting to reasoning is what takes Cortex out of the picking bin and into the kind of work where contact matters. Assembling a component under tension. Placing a windshield wiper without scratching it. Kitting parts that have to land in exactly the right orientation for the next station. That’s the next market Sereact is going after with Cortex 2.

    Sereact demonstrated the current generation at MODEX in Atlanta this month – single-arm picking, dual-arm returns handling, and the Sereact Lens 3D perception system – and North American interest has reportedly grown steadily since.

    Bullhound Capital Founding Partner Per Roman: “After looking at a deluge of humanoid robotics companies, my fellow Partner Alon Kuperman and I were delighted to meet Ralf and Marc, the co-founders of Sereact, who have built an AI operating system that seamlessly retrofits into the world’s vast fleet of industrial robots already in action.”

    This post was originally published on this site.