Europe's new robotics unicorn: Germany's RobCo hits $1B valuation(techfundingnews.com) |
Europe's new robotics unicorn: Germany's RobCo hits $1B valuation(techfundingnews.com) |
First, my father worked as an industrial mechanic in an amazon distribution hub. But he couldn't touch any of the automation. Amazon would bring in German contractors for months at a time to work on the robots, conveyor belts, automation hardware. They made 2.5-3x my father, had 6 weeks vacation, didn't pay for lodging in the US. To me, Amazon's idea of US jobs were the backbreaking labor 'pickers' and 'sorters'.
Second, half my professional career has been in office/factory configurations. Where the engineering offices are glued onto some factory. We're HEAVILY invested in automation. The factory workers are barebones crew designated by union minimums. We have a team of 2-5 people (really, 2 engineers, 3 technicians) who design, build, program, and maintain automated stations. Ranging from a robotic arm picking different components in the correct amounts and putting them in a box, heavy forklift-like robots moving product around, and robotic arms performing some manufacturing task.
What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
Why haven't we hired like 3 junior people to apprentice with the senior guys? They make machines that make money! The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
Maybe I'm wayyyy off the mark, but investing in "US Manufacturing" by importing automation (whether it's from the EU or Asia or anywhere else) probably won't end well and seems like marketing.
It's not necessarily a bad thing if there's balance to it. Maybe it's OK if Germans are great at industrial automation and Americans are great at writing word processors. But I'm not sure there's a nice balance to it. Especially if you're in a developing country which is good at neither of those things.
They probably just used the Germans because they are cheaper.
And the German has universal healthcare, clocks out at 5 and can’t be bothered, and gets real vacation time.
https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/automation-engineer/
These are shitty job tbh. Friend of a friend worked on designing and testing windscreen wiper motors in Poland. Company did a round of layoffs and there are zero jobs in the country. There is one job in US - nobody will sponsor a visa. He doesn't know the language to work in Asia.
He switched to software.
A lifetime of working in mission critical environments taught me one thing. When people leave, nothing happens. People come and go, and everyone is replaceable, even those who believe the company will fail without them. Most departures barely make a ripple. With today's advances in technology, it's only becoming more likely that none of us will be needed down the road.
What share of the investor money is from USA?
Oof. Amazed that venture-backed robotics companies are still interested in making this work.
I believe theres on the order of 100s of millions in losses across a number of robotics companies that have attempted this in the last 10 years.
It makes more sense for complicated products, and things where any one user's demand is uneven. Industrial "plant" construction equipment is often leased for similar reasons.
Airplane engine manufacturers retain ownership of their engines, and sell kilonewton-hours to airlines.
Edit : typo
this one doesn't sound that evil though? Just a simple portmanteau that may not sound as stupid in German?
Eyerolling to anyone with half a brain.
But maybe most people don't have half a brain.
However, raising capital in Europe/Germany is so hard. Still majority of the Germans don’t invest their money and just let it depreciate in their savings accounts. Because of that most startups are funded by US venture capitalists. Hope this one would be able to sustain the valuation
Do you have a source on this? I live in Germany and most people I know either invest into stocks (safe, boring ones), invest into a house/apartment/land or similar, or are too broke to even save anything at all (most people).
You must be interacting with young people because they have started investing after Covid with neobrokers. But the real wealth is with boomer generation and they just let it rot in savings accounts. Maybe things would change once the wealth transfer from boomers to millennials happens
They, per the article, have set up manufacturing there and a research lab in SF.
The co-founder has also relocated to the USA.
Much of the dismissal I think doesn’t come from a bad place - people see potential in europe, why can’t it a similar market?
Poking holes in every new idea is a pan-European pastime - it's how people in this region of the world managed to survive despite exhausting its resources.
The next level up of decacorn is sub 100 so if we only tracked that it’d be a bit limited.
That's kind of the point though, isn't it?
But it looks like they're trying to build something that is actually useful.
By the time we get robots capable of folding laundry, we'd already have solved many, many other use-cases.
Seriously a laundry folding robot excites me much more than a CLI that can generate code. I enjoy generating code myself! I don’t enjoy laundry. Total killer app.
What a weird accusation. I do this myself, it takes like half an hour a week and is actually quite relaxing.
I'm not sure you realize how spoiled people sound who would spend thousands of dollars to replace such an insignificant inconvenience.
But the thing about private market valuations is that you can't know if investors are right ex ante, so it's helpful to discount.
A $1B valuation sort of just means you now effectively "owe it" to shareholders, and you're now 100% incentivized to deliver that to them in some form, instead of being fully incentivized to deliver on your true vision to your customer.
When done well, private diligence can help uncover blind spots and fund company growth in key areas at the service of that true vision.
When done poorly because of FOMO over AI, robotics, or the latest hype, it can turn into preemptive enshittification.
Germans are totally capable of their own scams (see Dieselgate or Berlin airport or ...).
Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vHfbUIQeW_A
You move to USA from a 3rd world country, take money from the Americans, Arabs and the Chinese, hire bunch of Israeli, Pakistani, Canadians, Romanians and Russian engineers and and you become an American success story.
You found a robotics company in Germany and you instantly fail the purity test, you are American company if you took too much US money, you are actually Polish if you hired too many Polish engineers etc.
It's just weird attitude.
Feels like eventually this company ends up being based there and no longer an “EU” company.
As long as there is no investors from Europe, these startups will just be a money funnel to America.
Don't know about Lingotto. Looks Italian.
Cherry Ventures is the only German investor. ETC is EU.
I read it as confirmation that there is apparently no shortage of investor money in Europe, since US investors are willing and able to invest here.
[1] https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-relo...
I read it as confirmation that there is apparently no shortage of investor money in Europe, since US investors are willing and able to invest here.
It matters more where the money goes, in this case into European innovation.
People demanding the perfect isolated national champion that takes no foreign money, no foreign workers, no foreign inputs, and uses no foreign services are going to be disappointed.
And, secondly maybe more important question: Who cares? As long as the business doesn't host their data in the land of the non-free, aren't affected by the whims of the current Tsar and can't be put offline by the flick of a switch, I don't really mind if the money comes from Australia, South Africa or India.
https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/
And not sure what RobCo is doing exactly, but LLMs are probably part of it as well.
The link looks great, but was hoping for more research-oriented details. This honestly looks more like an advertisement, which doesn't tell me much about how progress is going.
Research is using a lot of VLM (or whatever Jim Fan decided to call them this year) when it comes to manipulation (robot arm). For navigation it is still a little mixed bag, best to see self driving advancement for that. On the control side (cool jumping humanoid) it's a mixture of RL/IL and traditional control(MPC) and running a slow ass VLM/LLM is not an option.
SOTA is hard to say in the sense that there's just so much variation to the task you want to measure. This can be considered SOTA in one aspect https://youtu.be/3aQWvdCac9o As it's an robot that can lift a heavy unknown object without information about it, RL trained in simulation, but at the same time trained eye will see that the task is made simple by fridge being put on a pallet making the bottom of it exposed for grabbing. On the other hand you have PI (Chelsea Finn / Sergey Levine) https://youtu.be/cRZNwgvcWUg that can do nothing of the thing above but can cook food and fold shirts. Deformable objects and tools interaction is hard so their demo is more focused on understanding and interacting with the world compared to the fine motion like the Boston dynamics one. The latter is also teleoperated, and teleoperation tend to look good but have pretty sad deployment success %
Industry is... Depends on startup vs established. VLA/LLM is flashy but really even 95% success rate is not enough for factory/logistics automation if the failure is unrecoverable, and VLM/LLM is far, faaaaaaaaaaaar from that success rate. In controlled settings traditional pipeline of detection + motion planning often outperform VLM/LLM hybrid models by a mile. Established ones have run humanleess logistic centers for many years now and they're seldom VLA stuff, although there is an interest in using it for the 5% failure cases. But they're not interested in SOTA.
Even on individual small building sites in France I'm now seeing mini-diggers instead of human shoveling, everywhere, or tile elevators (for a 3 man roofing team!) instead of the stereotypical exploited immigrant manual labourer. These are justified by insurers quoting such a high price for covering the expected accident and long term health costs of human shoveling or tile carrying to roofs that buying the machines is cheaper.
Fwiw laundry takes a pretty significant chunk out of my weekend. I wouldn't spend “thousands of dollars” to reduce it but at around the price of a new phone I’m totally in the market.
The downvotes are puzzling.
[0] https://www.meritshot.com/rolls-royce-case-study
EDIT: wording
Europe shut down more than 20 Diesel refineries in the past 20 years and then we cry that Diesel is too expensive and blame the Americans. Pathetic.
Our industrial and energy policy is that we will become completely dependent on the Middle East, US, Russia and China so we have absolutely no autonomy and no viability. Embarrassing. Pathetic. Shameful.
Germany shutting down nuclear and coal powered plants was their own decision. I kind of agree with your evaluation, but confusingly it seems like they want it like that (?)
Wasn't the Hormuz straight perfectly fine before the USA decided to... well do whatever they did?
Note specifically, my emphasis.
"alongside new backers Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective"
As far as I know they sell the engines at a loss or breakeven but make money on the service later.
When I worked for KeyW Corporation I had shares with the company, and every time they did anything they made announcements, like if they acquired someone. I had left the company and during my leave Jacobs Engineering bought out KeyW, sold off some of their own business endeavours and paid off all of KeyW's debt and shifted their focus towards government contracting and less so in oil infrastrcuture (if I remember correctly, Jacobs is a big company). This was all publicly announced.
The startup doesn't need to disclose anything, but if a public company invested in them, they will eventually have to do a quarterly report and disclose it.
If Europe did not shut down domestic energy production and oil and gas extraction in order to buy oil and gas from Russia then oil and gas would be a lot cheaper today.
Blaming the Americans for what we did to ourselves is insane and rooted in deep ignorance of what actually happened in Europe in the past two decades.
But yet again this just shows how totally dependent we in Europe are on Americans for everything. Pathetic.
The fucked up part is that the higher your salary you end up paying more money to receive the same service as someone paying way less with a lowers salary. Think of it as one paying 5$ for Netflix and other paying 50$ to watch the same shows with no change in service offering.
Also, since covid times the health service has degraded significantly. You have to wait months to get an appointment for a specialist and also if you are single then you would be the one paying the most for it.
Further, from a 100k salary you take only 58k home (Single person that is Tax class I). Keep in mind 100k salary is not that common in Germany and only a handful of people earn that much. This site calculates the take home salary and taxes/social contributions. (https://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gross_net_calcu...)
You between 25-30 vacation days and work time can be flexible depending on where you work.
I would say Germany is a good place if you’re married and have kids. Then you get a lot of subsidies from the government and it’s relatively cheap to raise children in Germany. But if you’re young and single, you will be punished for that will be taxed the most.
Also you forgot the contribution assessment ceiling at €69,750/year.
However, Germany has a legitimate problem when contribution levels, service quality, and access aren't aligned with what people feel they're paying. That is a different discussion which needs much more nuance and intimate knowledge of the German healthcare system.
As it stands its just an extraction machine to the boomer benefit and it wont survive by the time i will need it
This is the part that makes it universal.
The number of newborns in germany last year was lowest since WW2. Seems like most germans don't agree with this assessment.
I am surprised that this suddenly is a “based on what data?” discussion.
It has always been an apples / oranges comparison.
If it's true it should be trivial to provide said evidence.
The universal healthcare is hard to quantify - because most decent companies include health insurance in the US and the quality of the public healthcare provision in Europe can be quite patchy (i.e. location-dependent)
Remember that you are comparing gross salaries too, and taxes are much higher in Germany so the engineer ends up with much less take-home pay.
That is a misguided simplification. Please correct this, before anyone starts to believe it for real.
So, “half goes away in taxes” is an exaggeration, but I can totally sympathize with the feeling. Especially since the quality of healthcare is declining and the pay-as-you-go pension system is only built to benefit the current generation of pensioners.
* note that, if one is earning less than 77'000€ today or less than 84'150€ in 2027, one is prohibited to switch to a private insurance. One of the most regressive precepts of the German system.
Government spending as a % of GDP in Germany is exactly 50%. So definitionally half of all money goes to taxes.
Are you counting in VAT on everything OP spends that money on? Are you counting capital gains taxes OP pays when investing that money? Are you counting the taxes paid by the employer for his role (which defacto come out of his pay, just before he gets it)? The property taxes he pays to live?
The employer doesn’t look at the employees salary as the only cost. Employers look at things rationally, using the all-in cost to employ someone (the combined total of all salary and government mandated taxes and benefits contributions). In many European countries this is 2X the persons salary or more.
I interact with a lot of engineers moving from Europe and US and it’s never how US politics portray it. German friends talk about paying for private insurance because the public one is so bad.
This is not acceptable. Healthcare should be a basic right, and a lot of European countries treat it as such (e.g. in Germany, everyone is insured, no matter their employment status, and its mandatory and equal for everyone regardless of their job).
People also can't be fired for being sick.
The whole thing is a scam run by our politicians, who of course are all private insured.
I can also tell you working in tech for a very long time, if you aren’t working for a Silicon Valley company you might have health insurance options, but that doesn’t mean they’re any good. Especially if you have a preexisting condition.
I'd love to hear about people working in 'tech' who don't have decent health insurance options. If that's you, where do you work and what do you do?
> preexisting condition
Not with ACA compliant plans
What does this mean?
https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/pre-existing-conditions/
https://www.hhs.gov/healthcare/about-the-aca/pre-existing-co...
> Health insurance companies cannot refuse coverage or charge you more just because you have a “pre-existing condition” — that is, a health problem you had before the date that new health coverage starts.
>Health insurers can no longer charge more or deny coverage to you or your child because of a pre-existing health condition like asthma, diabetes, or cancer, as well as pregnancy.
>They cannot limit benefits for that condition either. Once you have insurance, they can't refuse to cover treatment for your pre-existing condition.
This has been in effect since 2014 due to the Affordable Care Act.
Of course it is forced, it has to be. What's the alternative? Make it voluntary, which immediately will lead to the total cost only being spread across sick people that definitely are going to cost the system money, resulting in an immediate increase in coverage cost, making it unavailable to a large part of the population? Just look at how well removal of the fee for non-coverage under the ACA worked in the US. That's just "let's take health insurance away from poor people" with more steps.
Younger generation would absolutely end up paying even more in the future to sustain the health costs of aging boomers.
Also the pension scheme in Germany for a lack of better word, is a ponzi scheme. Again, younger generation is paying to sustain the boomers and by the time those young people goes into retirement, they would barely get anything out of what they have paid.
outside germany the `,` reads as thousands-separator. may I offer you a `.` in exchange?
also that's gross, not net (Brutto/Netto) which is _painfully_ lower.
If you like it or not, it is anti-solidarity if you benefit from a system that you have never contributed. That is just free loading and one should be ashamed of it.
So yes, Americans love consuming healthcare. Is there any category they aren’t a high consumer of? You can’t measure efficiency only looking at the input side.
"visible" and "invisble" Brutto. The one is without "contributions from employer", which is a lie anyway since an employer makes a total comp perspective and he for sure includes his "contribution" into that
I anyway doubt that the wages would be at the same standard if there wouldn't be any deductions (from the beginning). Wages in expensive cities are higher because the cost of living must be matched. Similarly salary negotiations account for deductions. Nobody wants a job that doesn't pay the bills.
I think it is important to be (at least a bit) precise in this debate.
I dislike the wording "social contribution", as these are (mandatory) insurances that benefit the insured person in case of sickness, retirement, loss of employment, etc. Discussion about the cost efficiency and fairness of the system are warranted, of course. Anyway, the current generation of retirees benefit greatly from it, so for them at least it was worth paying.
Since you are accounting all those taxes, including the VAT on the citizen's side, companies only pay the Arbeitgeberanteil (you didn't mention) and the taxes on profit?
If you mean the existence of two-tier private/public insurance, yes. The two-tier system was abolished in most of Europe for good reason. Either they abolished substitutive private insurance, restricted it, or transformed private insurers into regulated providers of universal basic coverage, e.g. very recently in the Netherlands.
If you have a different idea, feel free to break the 90k down yourself. Don't lazily push the work on other people, asking them to puzzle together where some neglected Wikipedia articles' table of magic numbers actually comes from. Hint: It's a number made up by an interest group called the "German Taxpayers Federation", representing mostly entrepreneurs and wealthy taxpayers. The number being opaque is intentional, because its purpose is to mislead and support their advocacy for tax cuts.