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.
“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.”
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/04/bmw-and-pepsico-robotics-partner-sereact-raises-e93-million-series-b-to-scale-across-the-us/
