Flexion Raises $50M to Develop Humanoid Robot Intelligence

Flexion, a startup founded by former Nvidia researchers, has successfully raised fifty million dollars in funding to develop advanced intelligence for humanoid and human-capable robots. Based in Zurich, the company, led by CEO Nikita Rudin and CTO David Hoeller, has now accumulated a total of fifty-seven point thirty-five million dollars since its inception in January.

The funding round saw participation from notable investors including DST Global Partners, NVentures, Redalpine, Prosus Ventures, and Moonfire Ventures. Flexion aims to establish a U.S. headquarters in the Bay Area as part of its expansion plans.

According to Rudin, the current landscape of robotics relies heavily on scripts, tele-operation, or task-specific code, which he argues does not scale effectively. Flexion's platform is designed to replace these outdated methods with a comprehensive autonomy stack.

This stack includes language-level reasoning, vision-language-action motion generation, and transformer-based whole-body control, enabling robots to understand instructions and adapt to new situations with minimal human involvement.

The company's vision extends beyond single robot forms or narrow behaviors, focusing instead on creating a general-purpose intelligence layer that can work across various tasks and morphologies. This approach positions Flexion's technology to potentially transform industries and daily life by providing humanoid robots with the intelligence necessary to be safe, capable, and indispensable partners to humans.

The report states that Flexion does not utilize hand-engineered behaviors or teleoperation, but instead focuses on synthetic data generated from high-performance physics simulations to train its models.

This methodology, combined with reinforcement learning techniques, allows for robust software that can generalize across the variability of real-world scenarios. Flexion initially targets humanoid robots because they present high-value opportunities across various applications, including industrial settings and logistics, with future aspirations in disaster response and planetary exploration.

The company's morphology-agnostic platform also opens avenues for deployment in wheeled platforms and multiarm systems. With thirty-one employees currently, Flexion plans to use its new capital to expand its R&D team in Zurich, grow its compute and robot fleets, and accelerate commercialization efforts.

The funding will also support scaling partnerships with major OEMs, as Flexion aims to license its software on an annual per-robot model. Investors like Philip Kneis from Redalpine highlighted the significance of Flexion's focus on creating a shared brain for robots, emphasizing its ability to translate cutting-edge research into practical, field-tested autonomy.

Sandeep Bakshi from Prosus Ventures noted that Flexion's simulation-first approach is compelling, especially as the market shifts away from labor-intensive teleoperation methods towards scalable simulation-based training.

Sources indicate that this funding is part of a broader trend in robotics investment, which has surpassed ten point seven billion dollars globally this year alone, indicating a strong appetite for innovation in the field.