Jeremy Kahn is Fortune’s AI editor, responsible for the magazine’s AI coverage. He is also the co-author of Fortune’s flagship AI newsletter, Eye on AI.
Sunrise Robotics, a startup that creates modular industrial robots and AI models that can be easily deployed in different environments, has become an overnight sensation after raising $8.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by Plural, a London-based early-stage venture capital firm founded by a group of well-known startup founders, including Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus and SongKick co-founder Ian Hogarth. Venture capital firms Tapestry, Seedcamp, Tiny.vc, and Prototype Capital also participated in the round. Sunrise, based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, declined to disclose its valuation after the funding. Tomaz Stolfa, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said the startup is trying to address the growing labor shortage at many European manufacturing companies. These companies currently account for 15% of Europe’s GDP and employ 32 million people. However, almost a third of Europe’s current manufacturing workers will retire in the next decade, and industrial companies have said they cannot find enough young workers to replace these departing employees. Sunrise believes that industrial robots could replace some of the manual cutting, welding, fastening and bolting work that people currently do on these companies’ production lines.
Stolfa said the company can have its dual-armed robot up and running on a new industrial production line in under 10 weeks, compared to up to eight months for a traditional industrial robot that needs to be programmed on-site. The startup does this by using cameras to collect detailed 3D data of the workstation where the robot will be deployed and recording the steps workers currently take to complete tasks at that workstation. Sunrise uses that camera data to create a digital twin of the workstation and trains an AI model in a simulator so it can control the robot to complete the task. It then transfers the control software to the real robot.
Sunrise Robotics isn’t the only robotics startup trying to use modern AI technology and modular design to get robots into factories and warehouses faster and cheaper. Paris-based Inbolt is also targeting industrial robotic arms, while Physical Intelligence is building “base models” that will allow any robotic arm to pick up and manipulate a variety of objects. Stolfa said Sunrise’s software uses a combination of small AI models and traditional computer coding to control its robots. As the robots learn new skills, he said, the time it takes to deploy them in future environments that require similar skills should be significantly reduced. He also said Sunrise has chosen to build standardized “cells,” as its robotic workstations are called, to make it easier to train robots to perform new tasks. The robotic workstations are designed by Sunrise itself, but are largely made from off-the-shelf parts, making them cheaper to manufacture and maintain. “We’ve made the equipment mass-produced,” he said. Stolfa said one reason traditional industrial robots are expensive and take a long time to deploy is that they’re typically designed specifically for a specific assembly line. That means only the largest manufacturing companies can afford to use them. Stolfa said Sunrise isn’t targeting businesses like the big automakers. Instead, he said the company is targeting the 60% of European manufacturers that are “highly specialized, low-volume,” meaning they make lots of different parts but relatively few finished products. He said Sunrise’s best target customers are likely companies that make fewer than 100,000 parts a year, but those that make up to 400,000 parts a year could also be suitable. So far, the company said it has signed letters of intent with about 10 customers, including those in the supercar, high-performance battery and consumer electronics industries. Andrew Bass, managing director of Asteelflash, an electronics manufacturer based in Bedford, England, was also an early Sunrise customer. In a statement, Bass said the startup helped him “implement cutting-edge innovation at incredible speed. Within months of collecting initial data, we had a fully trained robot with operational intelligence that was operational within hours of delivery.”
Two of Sunrise’s three co-founders are seasoned entrepreneurs, and both worked in tech in Silicon Valley. Stolfa has co-founded several companies, including voice communications company vox.io and messaging app developer Layer. Co-founder and CTO Marco Thaler previously founded Airnamics, which makes artificial intelligence for robots and drones. Meanwhile, the third co-founder and Sunrise chief business officer Joe Perrott was head of global project management at PCH International, which helps companies build supply chains, including finding contract manufacturing partners. Its clients include Apple, Amazon, Google, and Square. The company currently has 25 employees in Ljubljana and offices in a dozen locations across Europe. Stolfa said she plans to use the new funding round to expand her team and ramp up production of her robotic workstations.
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Post time: Jun-27-2025
