Company · Agile Robots 1 items

One-line positioning

Munich-headquartered force-controlled robotics company founded by former German Aerospace Center (DLR) researchers, with a second headquarters in Beijing, positioned as Europe's reference player in industrial force-controlled robotics.

Key facts

Founded in Munich in 2018 by robotics researchers from the German Aerospace Center (DLR/RMC) and Harbin Institute of Technology, including Zhaopeng Chen and Peter Meusel. Munich serves as global headquarters, with Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Zhengzhou, Harbin, Kunshan, Changsha, Chongqing and India as additional sites, and more than 3,200 employees worldwide. In September 2021 the company closed a USD 220 million Series C led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, reaching a valuation above USD 1 billion. The company is privately held.

Products & tech

The portfolio spans industrial collaborative arms and mobile robots: the Diana 7 seven-degree-of-freedom force-controlled arm, Diana 7 Med for medical use, the Thor 3, Thor 7, Thor 7 Pro, Thor 12 and Thor 20 high-precision arm series, the full-size humanoid Agile ONE, the H10-W assistant robot, the FIP flexible intelligent platform, AMR mobile manipulators, the Tekken D electric two-finger gripper, the VT10-G visuo-tactile sensor, plus Zeus 3 and Zeus 4 power-grid operation robots, the Hera rail-mounted inspection robot and a mobile welding robot. The core advantage is joint-integrated high-precision torque sensing for sensitive force control and collision detection, paired with the in-house Agile Core robot operating system and vision algorithms.

Market position

In force-controlled arms and industrial embodied AI, Agile Robots is one of the few vendors that develops torque sensors, force-control algorithms and a robot operating system in house. Deployments cover automotive, consumer electronics, medical, agriculture and general manufacturing. The group has filled capability gaps through acquisitions: Franka Emika of Munich in November 2023, now integrated as Franka Robotics; majority control of BMW's mobile robotics spin-off idealworks in October 2023 and the remaining shares in September 2025; and thyssenkrupp Automation Engineering (Krause Automation) in 2026. Additional subsidiaries include audEERING and BAER Automation.