Zurich-based Flexion, a robotics intelligence startup developing a reinforcement learning platform for humanoid robots, has raised €43 million ($50 million) in Series A funding.
The round was led by DST Global Partners with participation from NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), redalpine, Prosus Ventures, and Moonfire. This follows a €6.3 million ($7.35 million) Seed round secured just months earlier.
“Our mission is simple but ambitious: to power the intelligence stack for humanoid robots, so they can work alongside humans, not depend on them. We’re not building the body. We’re building the brain. This is a hard problem. But the right kind of hard,” said the Flexion team.
Across Europe, 2025 has seen a steady flow of capital into robotics and autonomous systems, illustrated by raises from companies such as NEURA Robotics in Germany, which secured €120 million for its cognitive humanoid platform; Unchained Robotics, also in Germany, which added €8.5 million to scale its automation-matching software; and sensmore, with €6.5 million to advance “Physical AI” for autonomous heavy machinery.
Further activity includes Energy Robotics, which raised €11.5 million for autonomous inspection systems; Greece’s Progressive Robotics, attracting €1.55 million to expand no-code automation for SMEs; Italy’s Adaptronics, which secured €3.15 million for adaptive gripper technology; and notably Switzerland’s mimic, raising €13.8 million for dexterous robotic hands – making it directly relevant as a fellow Zurich-based robotics startup.
Together these deals amount to roughly €165 million in disclosed funding, situating Flexion’s €43 million Series A as one of the more substantial mid-range raises in a year marked by diversified investment across cognitive robotics, autonomous inspection, dexterous manipulation, and industrial automation.
Founded in 2024, Flexion is on a mission to build the intelligence layer for robotics – focusing not on mechanical innovation, but on the adaptive autonomy needed to make humanoid robots functional in dynamic, real-world settings.
The founding team of Flexion comprises engineers and scientists with backgrounds in reinforcement learning, control systems, mechatronics, and perception – hailing from institutions such as ETH Zurich, and companies including NVIDIA, Meta, Google, Tesla, and Amazon.
Its platform combines natural language task comprehension, synthetic vision-language-action training, and transformer-based full-body control to create robots that can operate with minimal human oversight.
These capabilities aim to free robotics from reliance on pre-scripted behaviours or constant teleoperation.
The newly raised capital will support expansion of the company’s R&D operations in Zurich, scale up its compute and robotic infrastructure, establish a presence in the United States, and drive the commercial rollout of its autonomy stack.
Flexion is already collaborating with major OEM partners, and the additional resources are expected to help deepen and globalise these commercial relationships.
While many robotics companies have made headlines for creating lifelike humanoid machines, few have managed to demonstrate scalable, useful applications outside controlled lab settings. The challenge isn’t mechanical – it’s cognitive.
Flexion’s approach addresses this by decoupling robotics intelligence from hardware design, enabling robots to interpret, plan, and act in unpredictable environments. Its software architecture is intended to work across various robot morphologies, unlocking use cases in manufacturing, logistics, industrial automation, disaster response, and even extraterrestrial missions.
The startup’s technology stack is structured in three layers:
- A Command Layer that uses large language models for task breakdown and contextual grounding
- A Motion Layer trained primarily on synthetic data but tuned for real-world exceptions
- A Control Layer that enables rapid behaviour synthesis from a modular skill library.
Together, these components enable Flexion-powered robots to exhibit learning and adaptability without relying on human input or brittle automation logic.
In a world facing significant demographic shifts and growing labour shortages – especially in industrial production – Flexion sees humanoid robotics not just as a technological possibility, but as an economic necessity.
With a third of the developed world projected to be over 60 by 2050, and mounting pressure on productivity, adaptable autonomous systems are fast becoming indispensable.
With the convergence of LLM-scale compute and new simulation environments, the startup is poised to transform move and think.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2025/11/zurichs-flexion-raises-e50-million-to-build-the-brains-behind-humanoids/
