A former Formula One engineer has left the world’s fastest racing cars to tackle a much bigger engineering challenge: teaching robots to work in factories.

Now, his Munich-based startup microagi has raised $55 million in the largest seed round secured by a German startup. Hummingbird led the round, with participation from Northzone, LocalGlobe, Village Global and redalpine. microagi declined to disclose its valuation.

Bercan Kilic landed his dream job as an aerodynamics engineer for Red Bull Racing in 2023, joining the Formula One team at the height of its dominance. But the excitement quickly disappeared.

Engineering was great, he said, but he wanted to dedicate his skills to something bigger. He set out to deploy robots in factories to create a world of abundant, low-cost goods and services.

microagi helps manufacturers train robots for specific jobs. Instead of building its own robots or artificial intelligence models, the company records workers using cameras and gloves equipped with sensors. It uses those images to teach existing robotic models how to perform specific tasks within a customer’s factory.

Kilic told Business Insider that five companies are collecting data through their platform, and one is preparing to deploy robots in a factory.

You may not have heard of microagi, but its consumer-facing arm, shift, went viral this year for offering free apartment cleaning in New York in exchange for recording first-person footage of cleaners washing dishes, mopping floors and folding laundry. This week, Shift began offering free private chefs in San Francisco.

The round comes as investors focus on robotics and physical AI, driven by the shift of AI from chatbots to machines, falling hardware costs, labor shortages and pressure to reorient supply chains.

Kilic said he’s not worried about microagi taking away jobs from people who help train robots. Instead, he sees factory robots as necessary to address labor shortages in Europe and the United States and keep pace with automation in China.

China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024, representing 54% of the global total, compared to 34,200 in the United States, according to a report by the International Federation of Robotics.

“If you run factories, the math is already on your desk,” Kilic said. “The most experienced people retire in this decade and their replacements were never born. Relocation only works if robots do it.”

Why microagi needs a change

microagi was founded last year in a Munich hacker house with the goal of moving robots from research labs to workplaces. The name reflects Kilic’s belief that AI models must become smaller before billions of robots can be deployed. Running huge models on so many machines would require too much computing power, he said.

At first, microagi planned to focus solely on implementation. It would take existing robots and AI models, train them with a customer’s data, and put them to work. But the team soon discovered that many robotic models were not capable enough to serve as a useful starting point.

Kilic compared the problem to training a new worker. An adult can learn a factory job in a week, while a child may never master it, no matter how good the instruction. Existing robotics models, he said, are even closer to children.

That realization led microagi to create shift, its data collection business. Shift operates in 15 countries and pays more than 20,000 people to record themselves performing physical tasks, Kilic said. It sells the images to artificial intelligence labs and robotics companies that develop robot “brains.”

Kilic declined to name microagi’s model partners, although companies building this type of technology include Physical Intelligence, Skild AI and Generalist AI. microagi adapts its partners’ models using each customer’s factory data and then helps implement them in robots. Its clients span the automotive, logistics and food industries.

“We provide data to labs, they provide us models, and then we apply proprietary data to make our customers happy,” Kilic said.

shift is microagi’s answer to one of the biggest bottlenecks in robotics. Large language models have been trained with large amounts of text and images from the Internet, but there is no comparable trove for robots. Ken Goldberg, a robotics expert at the University of California, Berkeley, has called this the “100,000-year data gap,” referring to the disparity between the training data available for robots and chatbots.

shift competes with companies like Scale AI, Turing and micro1, which also pay people to record themselves performing tasks that robots could eventually perform.

Chasing a ChatGPT moment

Kilic said microagi will use the new funds to pay for the computing power needed to train robotic models, expand Shift’s data collection network and grow its U.S. presence from New York.

Microagi employs 37 people worldwide, while Shift has about 75, Kilic said.

He believes robotics is approaching its “GPT-2 moment.” For language models, that was the point at which researchers discovered that adding more data and computing power could produce predictable improvements. Robotics companies are still working on that recipe, Kilic said, but he believes the industry is not far from its “GPT-3.5 moment,” when the technology becomes useful enough for broad deployment.

Hummingbird managing partner Firat Ileri, who led the investment, said he was impressed by the intensity of microagi during a visit to its Munich headquarters, where employees rarely seemed to leave the office. Hummingbird was an early investor in AI coding startup Lovable, cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, and AI chip startup Etched.

Ileri said microagi stood out because of the ambition of Kilic and his co-founders and the startup’s focus on automating European factories as the continent’s workforce ages and shrinks. The EU average age reached 44.9 years in 2025, up from 39.6 years two decades earlier, according to Eurostat. The European Commission estimates that the bloc’s workforce could shrink by up to 18.8 million people by 2050.

Kilic’s four co-founders are former Mercedes F1 engineer Yoan Iliev, former Alan Turing Institute researcher Anton Poletaev, RWTH Aachen engineer Nico Nussbaum and serial entrepreneur Artjem Weissbeck.

The five co-founders have set an audacious goal. Kilic said they want microagi to become the world’s largest company within five years, with its technology running in tens of millions of robots.

“In five years, if we haven’t deployed more than 20 or 30 million robots, it will be a big failure,” he said.

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