Announcing Sereact's €25M Series A
Scaling AI-first software for general purpose robotics.
When I first started going deep into AI research a decade ago, robotics was stuck in a dead end.
Unwieldy software, abstruse programming languages, a lack of data outside of small simulations, and immature tooling - either open source or not - conspired to make it an unloved field.
Research in robotics was concentrated in a small, but dedicated, community. This was the case despite the clear potential of robotics to speed up processes, address labor shortages, and complete dangerous or boring tasks. Of course, we occasionally marveled at Boston Dynamics demos and DARPA robotics challenge fail videos along the way.
On Air Street Press, we’ve written about ‘vibe shifts’ before - where the mainstream suddenly re-evaluates an approach or a company and the mood swings from bear to bull (or the other way). The power of (V)LLMs to combine natural language commands and scene understanding (and world modeling next) has triggered a robust positive vibe shift in robotics.
Sereact, founded in 2021, was there before the vibe shift. They were the first to combine zero-shot visual reasoning with natural language instructions to create PickGPT, software for human operators to interact with robotic arms in warehouse settings. This means robotics solutions can be deployed within a single day, without explicit training for new tasks (or new customers either), so they can start delivering savings and output improvements immediately. Sereact’s software can be used for picking and packing items, conducting quality checks, sorting goods, and automating inventory management.
I first met the Sereact team in 2023, when Air Street co-led their Seed round with our friends at Point Nine. Over the past 18 months, I have been continually amazed by the pace of R&D, their commitment to their customers, and the quality of the team they’ve built. The sense of urgency that co-founders Marc Tuscher and Ralf Gulde bring to everything they do is inspiring and nothing short of hardcore. It’s led to them working with seriously demanding customers such as BMW, Daimler Truck, European e-commerce giants like Bol and Active Ants.
Sereact’s next chapter
That’s why I’m delighted that Sereact is now taking the next step in its journey, with a €25M Series A, led by Creandum, alongside significant participation from Air Street and Point Nine. They’ve also received the backing of a number of prominent angels, including former Formula 1 World Champion Nico Rosberg, Mehdi Ghissassi (AI71, ex-DeepMind), Ott Kaukver (Skype), Lars Nordwall (neo4j), Torsten Reil and Niklas Köhler (Helsing).
This financing will let Sereact expand its US team and to scale their R&D efforts across new embodied AI hardware platforms, such as mobile robots and humanoids.
We’re proud to keep supporting Sereact as they enter this next chapter.
You can read more about today’s news on Bloomberg and the Sereact website.
