Sereact Secures €25M for AI-Powered Robotics Expansion

Sereact raises €25m for AI-powered robotics

The company plans to expand its operations in the US. Germany-based start-up Sereact has secured €25m in a Series A funding round which will support its development of additional artificial intelligence(AI) robotic platforms, including mobile robots and humanoids. Founded in 2021, Sereact develops AI models which bring automation to sectors such as warehousing and logistics. Specifically, the company uses vision language action models (VLAM) to enable robots to perceive their environment and subsequently develop strategies to perform a wide range of physical tasks. It currently counts BMW Group and MS Direct among its list of customers. The funding round was led by Creandum, alongside participation from existing investors Point Nine and Air Street Capital, and business angels, including former Formula 1 World Champion Nico Rosberg, Ott Kaukver (Skype), Mehdi Ghissassi (formerly of Google DeepMind), Lars Nordwall (formerly Neo4j), Rubin Ritter (formerly of Zalando), Torsten Reil and Niklas Köhler (both of Helsing). In addition to advancing robotics, Sereact said that it will use the funding to expand its operations in the US and further develop AI solutions for "more complex tasks beyond logistics and manufacturing". According to the start-up, the robotics industry is undergoing a fundamental shift, and it is for this reason that Sereact wants to use its technology to enable robots "to function as intelligent, adaptable agents rather than pre-programmed machines." Ralf Gulde, the CEO and co-founder of Sereact, claimed that the oversubscribed round, alongside the company's technology progress, will enable it to "democratise robotics" and "set new standards for autonomous systems in global markets". Johan Brenner, general partner at Creandum, said: "The opportunities here are endless, and it's great to see this kind of innovation coming from Europe." In 2023, Sereact raised $5m in seed funding develop its advanced robotics solutions. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

AI-powered robotics startup Sereact raises €25 million - SiliconANGLE

German artificial intelligence robotics startup Sereact GmBH today announced it raised €25 million, about $26 million, to accelerate the development of its AI models for robots and its robotics platform. The funding came from a Series A funding round led by Creandum, with participation from existing investors Point Nine and Air Street Capital. Founded in 2021, Sereact develops robots and AI vision language action models that allow them to understand the world and interact with objects in real time without the need for complex training or programming. The startup provides industrial and collaborative robotics using vision transformers that can recognize as-yet unknown objects with high accuracy and interact with them without additional pre-training. Using the company's technology robots can pick and pack items in warehouses, handle fragile objects, sort goods, manage inventory and more. "With our technology, robots act situationally rather than following rigidly programmed sequences," said Ralf Gulde, chief executive and co-founder of Sereact. "They adapt to dynamic tasks in real-time, enabling an unprecedented level of autonomy." According to the company, it used zero-shot reasoning as part of its PickGPT model to create fully autonomous robotics by combining generative AI capabilities and large language model and vision model AI with robotics manipulation. This allows robots to understand speech commands, visually identify objects, interpret unfamiliar situations without prior training and use advanced reasoning to implement plans. For example, a user could ask a robot to remove only green boxes from a particular bin and place them in another. The robotic vision model would then make the plan that it can see two green boxes and it is now going to reach in, remove them and place them into the alternate bin. It will be able to do this even if the two green boxes are oddly shaped and different shades of green. Sereact already supports a wide variety of robotics throughout numerous industries, with customers including automakers BMW Group and Daimler Truck, online retailer Bol, and e-commerce solution companies MS Direct AG and Active Ants BV. The company said that the funding will enable the development of AI solutions to support more complex tasks beyond logistics and manufacturing. With the expansion of those efforts, Sereact said it intends to look into supporting additional robotic platforms, including mobile robots and humanoids.

AI startup Sereact lands €25M to give dumb robots better brains

Stuttgart, Germany-based Sereact has secured €25mn to advance its embodied AI software that enables robots to carry out tasks they were never trained to do. "With our technology, robots act situationally rather than following rigidly programmed sequences. They adapt to dynamic tasks in real-time, enabling an unprecedented level of autonomy," said Ralf Gulde, CEO and co-founder of Sereact (short for "sense, reason, act"). Early Spotify and Klarna-backer Creandum led the Series A round. Existing investors Point Nine and Air Street Capital also chipped in as did several prominent angel investors. These include former Formula 1 World Champion Nico Rosberg, ex-DeepMind product lead Mehdi Ghissassi, and past Skype exec Ott Kaukver. Typically, robots -- like those Roomba vacuum cleaners -- are hard-coded. This means they follow exact instructions that enable them to repeat specific tasks. Sereact's eembodied AI, however, acts like a robot's brain, allowing them to analyse and even learn new jobs on the go. This is thanks to a machine learning technique called zero-shot visual reasoning, which allows AI to understand and interpret images without prior specific training on those types of images. The model, dubbed PickGPT, makes robots smarter. It also means humans don't have to pre-program them for each task, saving time for the companies that use them. "The opportunities here are endless and it's great to see this kind of innovation coming from Europe," said Johan Brenner, general partner at Creandum. Sereact's approach is similar to that of UK startup Wayve, which raised $1bn in Europe's largest-ever AI funding round last year. However, while Wayve's tech targets autonomous vehicles, Sereact focuses on logistics and warehouse robots that do things like pick and pack, sort goods, and run quality control checks. Firms like BMW, Daimler Truck, Bol and Active Ants have already adopted Sereact's software at their factories. However, the startup is now looking to venture beyond the warehouse. Sereact said it will use the fresh funding to develop new "robot hardware platforms," such as mobile robots and humanoids. The company also plans to expand its US presence. "We're on an exciting journey to become the leading platform for robotics applications that forever change the daily lives of people and businesses," said Gulde.

Sereact Raises $26 Million for AI Warehouse Robotics Efforts | PYMNTS.com

German tech company Sereact has raised $26 million for its AI-powered robotics efforts. The company's Series A round, announced Monday (Jan. 20), will allow Sereact to expand its research and development efforts to support additional robotic platforms, including humanoid and mobile robots. In addition, Sereact said it will use the financing to create artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for more complicated tasks beyond logistics and manufacturing. "The robotics industry is undergoing a fundamental shift," the company said in a news release. "While most AI robotics companies focus on hardware-first solutions, Sereact is leading with a software-first approach, enabling robots to function as intelligent, adaptable agents rather than pre-programmed machines. This flexibility is what sets us apart and drives our vision to make embodied AI the standard for robotics across industries." Founded in 2021, Sereact makes vision language action models (VLAM) that allow robots to understand and adapt to their environments in real-time -- without complex programming. Its customers include BMW, Daimler Truck, Bol, MS Direct and Active Ants. "With our technology, robots act situationally rather than following rigidly programmed sequences. They adapt to dynamic tasks in real-time, enabling an unprecedented level of autonomy," said Ralf Gulde, the company's CEO and co-founder. As PYMNTS wrote last month, efforts like Sereact's are happening as retailers and logistics companies are dealing with mounting pressure to automate their operations to meet surging eCommerce demand. New developments like the PRoC3S tool developed at MIT could finally solve the long-standing challenge of robots safely carrying out more complex warehouse jobs that typically require human dexterity and spatial awareness, that report said. "In theory, PRoC3S could reduce a robot's error rate by vetting its initial LLM-based assumptions against more specific and accurate understandings of the warehouse environment," Erik Nieves, CEO and co-founder at Plus One Robotics, said in a recent interview with PYMNTS. "Think about it like this: A warehouse robot operating solely on LLM guidance has been described how to complete a task. The PRoC3S concept goes one step further by placing a digital robot in a simulated environment of that task. It's essentially the difference between classroom instruction and a really good field trip."