German robotics startup Sereact GmbH announced today that it has raised $110 million in new funding to scale up its artificial intelligence “robotic brain” platform and expand into the U.S.

Founded in 2021 by Ralf Gulde and Marc Tuscher, both former AI researchers at the University of Stuttgart, Sereact builds software that allows industrial and warehouse robots to handle tasks they have not been explicitly programmed to perform. The company’s Cortex foundation model for robotics interprets natural language instructions and translates them into physical actions, letting operators redirect a robot to a new task without writing new code.

The latest version of the company’s model, Cortex 2.0, includes features that augment a vision-language-action model with a world model. The system generates a set of candidate future movements from the robot’s current state, runs them against a learned model of physics and object behavior and scores each one for stability, risk and efficiency before acting.

Sereact describes the approach as letting robots predict the consequences of their actions. That differentiates it from rivals such as Physical Intelligence Inc., Skild AI Inc. and Covariant AI Inc. that rely more heavily on end-to-end vision-language-action models. The company’s software is hardware-agnostic and runs across robotic arms, mobile manipulators and humanoid platforms from multiple suppliers.

Customers include Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, Daimler Truck Holding AG, PepsiCo Inc. and European e-commerce logistics operators Bol and Active Ants. The company has more than 200 of its systems deployed across Europe and has completed more than 1 billion production picks, with roughly one in every 53,000 requests requiring remote human intervention.

The Series B funding round was led by Headline VC, with Bullhound Capital, Felix Capital Partners, Daphni SAS, Creandum AB, Air Street Capital Ltd. and Point Nine Capital GmbH also participating.

“The physical AI opportunity is one of the largest we’ve seen in a generation and we believe it will rewire global supply chains and manufacturing,” said Trevor Neff, growth partner at Headline VC. “Behind great opportunities and great companies are great founders and Ralf and Marc are building into that opportunity the right way: real deployments, real data and a model that compounds and gets better with every single pick.”

The funding will be used to accelerate development of Cortex 2.0 and to push into the U.S. market, where Sereact plans to open its first American office in Boston and hire commercial, application and engineering staff locally.

The new funding takes the total raised by Sereact to more than $140 million, with the company last having raised a round of $26 million in January 2025.

Photo: Sereact