Agile Robots has raised $500 million in a funding round led by SoftBank, valuing the Munich-based robotics company at $8.5 billion. The company announced the investment in a statement Bloomberg reported, bringing total funding to around $2 billion.

Nvidia, Hitachi, and T.Capital also participated in the round. The investment comes five months after reports emerged that SoftBank was in early talks to invest in Agile, with a raise of around $800 million under discussion. The final amount was smaller, but the valuation puts the company among Europe's most valuable robotics businesses.

At $8.5 billion, Agile moves ahead of fellow German startup Neura Robotics, which reached a valuation of roughly $7 billion in June after securing a record $1.4 billion Series C. Agile now claims to be Europe's most valuable privately held robotics company.

The new capital will fund expansion in the US and other markets, as well as additional manufacturing capacity. The company recently opened a humanoid robot factory near Munich and expects to produce around 2,000 units in 2026. Output could double or triple in 2027. CEO Zhaopeng Chen also told the New York Times that the funding puts Agile in a stronger position to consider a future IPO.

The company is trying to move its robots beyond pilot projects and into industrial production. Its latest systems are being tested with manufacturing customers, including Volkswagen's Audi.

Agile also sells a smaller robot weighing around 40kg to universities and laboratories, where deployments can generate the real-world data needed to improve performance and make the machines easier to retrain.

Chen has described the race to develop physical AI as a capital-intensive “war”. He expects humanoid robots to become more efficient as the technology advances.

“We are fast-approaching the tipping point where humanoids will be more efficient,” he said, while acknowledging that battery life, weight distribution, and the quality of real-world training data remain unresolved challenges.

For SoftBank, the investment brings the Japanese group back to a company it knows well. It led Agile's $220 million Series C in 2021, which made the German startup the country's first robotics unicorn. Founder Masayoshi Son has since placed robotics at the centre of SoftBank's AI strategy, although that expansion has encountered setbacks.

Chinese regulators blocked the group's planned $5.4 billion acquisition of ABB's robotics business, which operates a significant production facility in Shanghai.

Founded in 2018 by researchers from the German Aerospace Centre, Agile develops humanoid robots, robotic arms, mobile robots, and the software that controls them. It says it has installed more than 20,000 robotic systems worldwide.

The next test is whether the company can turn its manufacturing ambitions into sustained production and commercial deployments. In a market where valuations are often built ahead of large-scale sales, Agile's ability to deliver thousands of robots could become a more meaningful measure of its progress.