Regions like the U.S. and Europe have been doubling down on rebuilding their industrial muscle, after decades of closing down factories and outsourcing the work to countries like China. To that end, a fast-growing Polish startup called Nomagic, which builds robots — specifically robotic arms — for logistics operations, is announcing $44 million in funding, money it will use for both technology and business development, including breaking ground on its first efforts to sell its robots to customers in regions outside Europe, specifically North America.
The investment is key not just for its size — the biggest round for Nomagic to date — but because of who is doing the funding and what is going on in the wider industrial landscape.
The perennial question that gets asked about how to make regions more competitive in industry again is a basic one: How? A large part of the workforce that used to run factories and warehouses of the past has moved to other kinds of jobs; and when it hasn’t, industrial operators have been reducing the number of human workers to cut costs and improve efficiency by bringing in more automation.
Sometimes the currents of human workers versus tech innovation to improve efficiencies have crashed together calamitously — witness the viral story about the Y Combinator startup that has spun up an AI-based workplace observer to highlight when workers are slacking off, a “sweatshop as a service,” as critics have called it.
Just being outraged, unfortunately, doesn’t mean these kinds of technologies are not being built, nor that humans will not become obsolete in some functions… or, on the other hand, that someone will not speak up for them, and their skills and work will continue and live on to fight another labor dispute. But it does point to the ongoing debates and struggles.
Nomagic’s funding, in part, appears to be a signal of how some see the world shaping up.
Leading this Series B is the VC arm of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The EBRD is a development bank co-owned by more than 70 countries and two European Union institutions.
The ERBD’s involvement here underscores the push that governments and their institutions are giving to try to spur private businesses in aid of their missions to rebuild industry: they do see robotics and technology as an important lever for helping to make Europe more competitive again in industry.
Alongside the EBRD, top-shelf, previous backers Khosla Ventures and Almaz Capital are participating, and in a final signal of institutional mission, the European Investment Bank (EIB) is also throwing in venture debt (the only kind of investment it tends to make).
Per PitchBook data, it looks like Nomagic had raised around $30 million previously (not counting the EIB debt), and while investors and the startup itself declined to give a valuation, Khosla partner Kanu Gulati confirmed to TechCrunch that it was indeed an “up round” for the startup. We’ve previously profiled the startup and its technology here and here.
The key thing to note about Nomagic’s robotic arms is that they are, in contrast to a lot of other robotics startups, not breakthroughs in hardware.
“Most of our hardware is off the shelf,” Kacper Nowicki — the CEO who co-founded the company with Marek Cygan (CTO) and Tristan d’Orgeval (CSO) — said in an interview.
The company’s focus instead has been on the software. Using computer vision, machine learning and other kinds of automation, it has essentially built out a “library” of different objects and how to move, pack and handle them.
The robots then are powered by Nomagic’s AI across a wide range of use cases, and can be redeployed relatively easily on a case-by-case basis. This is in contrast to how a lot of robotic arms have been built and are operated, Nowicki said. D’Orgeval admitted it’s “contrarian” but Nomagic has no interest in building humanoid robots, since a lot of the moving parts are best served by wheels in industrial spaces.
The company says it has grown its annual recurring revenues by 220% in the last year (although it’s not disclosing an actual number). It says it’s on track for another 200% of ARR growth this year on the back of demand from new and existing customers in verticals like e-commerce and pharmaceuticals.
Its customers include Apo.com, Arvato, Asos, Brack, Fiege, Komplett or Vetlog.one, the company said.
Nomagic’s closest competitor, Covariant, last year was the subject of an interesting deal with Amazon. The e-commerce leviathan is a big investor in robotics for its own warehouses, and in July 2024, it emerged that it had hired Covariant’s founders and worked out a major licensing deal with the startup. It was not a full acquisition, to be clear — Covariant is still operating as an independent company — but as a ballpark of what Nomagic’s valuation might be, Covariant reportedly was last valued in 2022 at around $625 million.
Companies like Nomagic, Covariant, and others in the space like Berkshire Grey and RightHand Robotics are developing their tech at a time when robotics is increasingly making its mark in industrial environments.
Big players like Nvidia and SoftBank (which acquired Berkshire Grey in 2023) have identified the opportunity to build for the market, underscored by two currents: large companies are slowly upgrading legacy equipment; and just as importantly, they are making a lot of noise around big bets that they and their partners will be building new physical spaces for manufacturing and logistics that will be greenfield opportunities for new equipment.
The role of government is not to be underestimated in this trend: the U.K., the European Union, the U.S. and other regions are all calling for more investment into industry, and they will be putting ever more money behind that order.
