Zurich startup Flexion, which was founded by a group of former Nvidia researchers, has raised $50 million in a new round of funding, bringing the total to $57.35 million. Their plan is simple – to create the best ‘brains’ for humanoid robots so far. The company was founded in January by CEO Nikita Rudin, CTO David Hoeller, and Julian Nubert and Fabian Tischhauser – all with backgrounds in robotics and machine learning from ETH Zurich and Nvidia.
What does Flexion actually do?
The idea is simple but ambitious – to build a universal “intelligence layer” for humanoid robots that works regardless of what the robot’s body is or what task it performs. Unlike approaches that rely on manually programmed movements or telecontrol, where a human controls the robot remotely, Flexion’s system takes input from synthetic data generated through high-performance physics simulations.
The platform combines linguistic discrimination, motion generation based on visual and linguistic inputs, and full-body control based on transformer architecture – so the same type of technology that drives large language models, only adapted to movement and perception.
Why now?
Robotics is experiencing a serious investment boom this year – more than 10.7 billion dollars have been invested globally in the robotics sector by November. Flexion claims that moreć works with major equipment manufacturers, and will use the fresh capital to open an office in the Bay Area, expand the team in Zurich, and scale the fleet of testing robots.
The business model is based on an annual software license per robot – which means that Flexion does not plan to build its own robots, but to sell “brains” that can be installed inside other people’s bodies, be it humanoids, wheeled robots or multi-armed systems.