10 Early-Stage Startups to Watch in 2026

Europe’s robotics renaissance is in full swing, being built in small teams, early labs, and first production pilots across the continent. While most attention still flows to later-stage humanoids, foundation models, and defence primes, the next breakout robotics companies are forming much earlier, at pre-seed, where new architectures, software stacks, and manufacturing approaches are still fluid.

This list highlights 10 early-stage European robotics startups to watch for 2026 - mostly pre-seed, all deeply technical, and all ultimately enabling us to tackle hard problems in the real world. These teams are building robots, full physical-intelligence stacks spanning perception, control, simulation, learning, and deployment, tightly coupled to real operational use cases.

Across mobility, manipulation, autonomy, and embodied AI, they are raising capital to move beyond pitch decks and demos, toward systems designed to survive factories, facilities, logistics sites, and even contested real-world environments. 

Some are still emerging from stealth, others already in pilots, but each represents a credible attempt to make robots genuinely useful at scale - and to redefine what European robotics can become over the next decade.

Note: this is far from a definitive list, and for this post we’ve focused only on some of the really early stage companies that crossed our path in 2025. We’ll be doing a follow-up post soon with those startups that have raised larger seed or Series A rounds. If you would like to be included, or nominate a company, reach out here.

And In March 2026, we're bringing this ecosystem together at Vantage Point: Robotics Edition in London - a curated investor summit + demo day that will connect Europe's most promising robotics founders with investors and other industry leaders.

Investors and startups request your spot below…

1. MAKIINA — Finland

Building the hardware and software stack for physical intelligence: modular, low-cost, scalable, and made in Finland. From drone motors and actuators to power electronics, sensor units, and a breakthrough AI robotics foundation model, each piece is built like LEGO blocks that fit together into different form factors of physical AI agents, affordably and at scale.

MAKIINA developed methods to produce dual robotic arm systems for under $1,200 all in-house, while iterating on hardware at software speed. Their robots learn tasks through human demonstration rather than rigid programming, handling "fuzzy" processes that traditional robots can't.

Stage: Seed | Founded: 2024 | Amount Raised: Not disclosed

2. Levtek — Sweden

Democratising automation through "software-defined" ultralight electric vehicles and collaborative robots. Their flagship product, the Levkart, is an autonomous electric utility vehicle designed to work alongside humans in shared workspaces like warehouses and industrial sites.

Levtek focuses on cognitive robotics - building "ride-on" robots that can reason, learn, and adapt to their environments. They've partnered with PostNord (Swedish national postal service) for logistics trials and collaborate with Malmö and Lund Universities on machine learning and human-robot interaction research.

Stage: Seed | Founded: 2023 | Amount Raised: €2.25m

3. Mimic — Switzerland

Deploying frontier physical AI across industries with AI-driven dexterous robotic hands paired with proven, off-the-shelf robot arms. "Humanoids are exciting, but there aren't many industrial scenarios where the full-body form factor truly adds value," says Co-founder Stephan-Daniel Gravert. "Our approach delivers the same capabilities in a way that is much simpler, more reliable and rapidly deployable."

Founded in 2024 as an ETH Zurich spin-off by Stefan Weirich, Stephan-Daniel Gravert, Elvis Nava, Benedek Forrai, and Robert Katzschmann, Mimic brings together a multidisciplinary team of 25 engineers developing an AI foundation model and humanoid robotic hands that make human-level dexterity deployable across industries.

Stage: Seed | Founded: 2024 | Amount Raised: €17m(€13.8m in latest round led by Elaia, alongside Speedinvest)

4. Paddington Robotics — UK

Founded in 2024 by Zehan Wang, who previously founded Magic Pony before exiting to Twitter, Paddington Robotics are building robots that help people do more. Starting in supermarkets and grocery stores, Paddington's robots are designed to lighten the load for staff working long, labor-intensive hours - boosting productivity and enabling them to do more with less effort.

"It may not be as flashy as kung-fu fighting or backflipping humanoids, but we are building for real-world impact, not just building tech for technology's sake." - Zeha Wang.

Stage: Pre-Seed | Founded: 2024

5. Loki Robotics — Switzerland

Building the autonomous backbone of facility operations. Loki is engineered to master one of the most complex physical tasks in robotics: cleaning like a person. The first robot designed to handle high-contact, high-variation environments - swapping tools, applying cleaning agents with precision, and physically interacting with fixtures and objects.

From deep overnight restroom cleaning to continuous day porter routines, Loki adapts to facility demands. "We spend over a year of our lives doing chores - time that could be spent raising kids, calling grandparents, making music, building things," says the team. At the core, they combine end-to-end learning with teleoperation to drastically shorten deployment time and unlock real-world capability fast.

Stage: Pre-Seed | Founded: 2024

6. Qualia — Denmark

Building the infrastructure layer for robotics AI. Qualia provides a platform for training and deploying VLA (Vision-Language-Action) models - foundation models that allow robots to reason about their surroundings using visual and text input, then execute physical tasks.

Their platform simplifies the complex workflow of training embodied AI with tools for data processing, model fine-tuning, and rapid iteration. Supporting leading VLA models like Pi 0.5, SmolVLA, and Gr00t 1.5, Qualia targets robotics engineers who need to iterate quickly, hardware companies adding AI reasoning via API, and foundation model labs distributing to a wider ecosystem.

Stage: Pre-Seed | Founded: 2025

7. Saturn Dynamics — UK

Saturn is developing the first world model as a virtual simulator, powered by a physics-aware generative engine. Prompt Saturn to generate and control simulations, reducing friction with your tech stack and lowering the time-to-market. Saturn takes in multimodal sensor data, state data, and text, to produce video annotated with world-state data.

Saturn aims to become the foundational simulator behind the autonomous systems that will shape our world in the coming years - powering every step from early-stage training to real-time decision-making when deployed in the real world.

Stage: Pre-Seed | Founded: 2025

8. Voyage Robotics — London

Building the world's first neural safety system for Physical AI-powered robots and vehicles, alongside humanlike AI controls for robots to automate any task. Committed to open-source robotics and partnering with other robotics and embodied AI builders to develop common, modular standards and platforms. The team is comfortable working with both software and hardware, aiming to build their own robot workers while helping others build theirs using Voyage's technology.

Stage: Pre-Seed | Founded: 2024

9. Kova Labs — Finland

Developing embodied intelligence for the next generation of unmanned systems in defence and national security.

Kova Labs builds the "brain" of autonomous hardware, giving machines a real-time understanding of the physical world to perceive, navigate, and act autonomously in complex and contested environments (where GPS might be jammed or communication restricted). Their technology processes complex spatial data like point clouds for 3D mapping, helping robots understand difficult terrains including forest environments. Backed by Lifeline Ventures and angels, they're modernising how unmanned systems operate in high-stakes defence applications.

Stage: Pre-Seed | Founded: 2025

10. Sunrise Robotics — Slovenia

Sunrise Robotics revolutionises manufacturing with intelligent, autonomous robotic cells that enhance flexibility, scalability, and efficiency.

Stage: Seed | Founded: 2023 | Amount Raised: $8.5M

From Helsinki to Zurich, London to Copenhagen, technical founders are building the physical intelligence stack that will define the next decade of automation - and they're doing it earlier, leaner, and faster than ever before.

These ten companies represent just the beginning.

If you're building in this space, or backing those who are, we want to meet you.

A curated investor summit and demo day connecting Europe's most promising robotics founders with the investors and industry leaders shaping embodied intelligence.

Request your spot: vantage.fov.ventures