$55,000,000 Raised To Record 20,000 People Doing Chores For Robot Replacements

German robotics startup Microagi raised $55 million to teach robots factory work using footage of thousands of people mopping floors and washing dishes.

The $55 million deal on Thursday is the largest initial funding round a German startup has ever raised, Microagi CEO Bercan Kilic claimed in a post on X. The 10-month-old AI startup has paid more than 20,000 people across 15 countries to film themselves working to sell the footage to robotics labs, according to its data arm’s website.

“It’s one-billionth of what Europe needs,” Kilic told Sifted.

Rather than building robots or AI models, the startup uses cameras and gloves with sensors to gather motion data of human workers performing chores, The Next Web reported. Microagi sends the data to other companies to teach their robotics systems how to perform factory jobs.

“We put our engineers on site with each customer, and the system learns from their real operations and feeds that back into the next run,” Microagi CTO Nico Nussbaum told Sifted. “So every month we’re there they pull a little further ahead of their competitors.”

Microagi did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Shift, the startup’s data arm, offered to clean New York