The latest news about the capitalization rounds finalized by two leading manufacturers of humanoid robots shows how far apart the venture capital markets in the US and Europe are. And these differences also have a significant impact on the future fate of the companies. On the one hand, who holds how much controlling interest in the company and thus determines the direction of new technology development and new markets; on the other hand, how many financing rounds a company can afford before the money tap is turned off. And in a capital-intensive sector, this can be decisive in determining whether a company has the financial staying power to survive or die.
Figure.AI
Figure.AI, a startup based in San Jose in the San Francisco Bay Area that is over three and a half years old, raised $1 billion in Series C funding in September 2025. The company’s valuation was reported at $39 billion. The VCs included lead investor Parkway Venture Capital, followed by Brookfield Asset Management, NVIDIA, Macquarie Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures, Tamarack Global, LG Technology Ventures, Salesforce, T-Mobile Ventures, and Qualcomm Ventures.
One billion dollars at a valuation of 39 billion means that founder and CEO Brett Adcock, a successful serial entrepreneur who first started the company with his own money and only then opened the first rounds of financing to other investors, gave up just under 2.6 percent of the company to the VC groups.
NEURA Robotics
In March 2026, just six months after Figure.AI’s announcement, NEURA Robotics, based in Metzingen, south of Stuttgart, also announced the completion of a major financing round worth one billion euros ($1.16 billion). Following a seed round worth 16 million euros and a Series A round worth 120 million euros, this is now the Series B round.
However, what distinguishes this financing round for NEURA Robotics, founded in 2019, from that of Figure.AI is the valuation of the companies. NEURA Robotics is valued at €4 billion ($4.65 billion), which is just under one-eighth of the US company. The investors in this
Valuation Differences
Since I have been intensively researching the state of the art of well over a hundred manufacturers of humanoid robots for my book Homo Syntheticus: Wie Mensch und Maschine verschmelzen (Homo Syntheticus: How Humans and Machines Are Merging), which will be published in German on June 4, 2026, and consider Figure.AI and NEURA Robotics to be among the leading companies, other factors must be playing a role in these significant valuation differences. So how do they come about? There are several reasons for this.
Firstly, how investors assess the company’s chances of capturing a significant share of the emerging market for humanoid robots.
Secondly, how many shares have already been sold in the first rounds.
Thirdly, how investors view the exit market. This refers to how realistic an IPO or acquisition by another company is considered to be, and what return on invested capital can be expected. If there is competition between several bidders who want to buy NEURA Robotics, driving up the share price, then this can only be good news for investors, as they will get back a multiple of their investment. An IPO as an exit can also provide a hefty return if the stock market launch is successful.
In Europe, however, such exits are limited. There are neither stock exchanges with the necessary liquidity nor a culture of acquisition in Europe. Companies often act hesitantly and tend to have a “we’d rather develop it ourselves” mentality. At the same time, the sale of companies to non-European companies has been made more difficult by regulations in order to prevent the sell-off of domestic know-how and technology. In Germany, this was not least the case with the sale of the German robot manufacturer KUKA to a Chinese conglomerate.
Fourthly, and certainly not unimportant, is how well investors assess the technology, the team, the patents, the supply chain, the customer base, and much more, and thus the market success.
Fifthly, the investment culture. In Europe, investors demand much higher stakes in the early rounds than in the US. In Silicon Valley in particular, there are standardized term sheets that, even in later rounds, take only a few percent of shares, often only in the mid-single digits, or even assign non-voting shares to startups, thus allowing the founders to retain majority control of the company even after many rounds. The best example is Meta (formerly Facebook), where founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg still holds more than fifty percent of the voting shares even after many financing rounds and an IPO – and can therefore do as he pleases.
Sixth, liquidity on the VC and financial markets. In the absence of a mature VC market like that in the US, there are still limits in Europe on the amounts of money that startups can raise. While there are still opportunities in Europe for sums of up to a few hundred million, in the US, tens of billions can be raised. The most recent example of this was Google’s sister company Waymo, which was able to raise $16 billion at a valuation of $126 billion, following earlier rounds of financing worth billions. With this round, Waymo gave just over 12 percent of its shares to investors.
The initial announcements testify to how lengthy this financing round was for NEURA Robotics. The first news of a targeted financing round at this now completed amount had already become known in June 2025. So it took nine months to come to fruition, and presumably at high discounts, i.e., the transfer of a large share of the company to investors.
Conclusion
Of course, there are differences in the technologies, market opportunities, and other factors between Figure.AI and NEURA Robotics that influence the valuations. However, the fact that two companies at the forefront of this new technology and market have such different valuations for a similar amount cannot be explained by this alone. The European VC market is much more limited for the reasons mentioned above.
If it were only a question of the amount of capital to be raised, then NEURA Robotics would be strongly advised to relocate its headquarters to the US. For Europe, however, this example should set off alarm bells, because especially with capital-intensive technologies such as humanoid robots, even the smallest differences in the accessibility and availability of capital to move forward at the appropriate speed and devote resources to developing the technology can mean the difference between life and death for a startup.
Postscript
For my book Homo Syntheticus: Wie Mensch und Maschine verschmelzen (Homo Syntheticus: How Humans and Machines Are Merging), which will be published in German in spring 2026, I have compiled a comprehensive list of manufacturers and their robots, which, as is the nature of the subject, remains incomplete. The book (in German) can already be ordered here, and an overview of all the manufacturers I have been able to identify so far can be found here.
