Foreign Affairs

$55,000,000 Raised To Record 20,000 People Doing Chores For Robot Replacements

Wikimedia Commons/Public/Jernej Furman from Slovenia, CC BY 2.0

German robotics startup Microagi raised $55 million to teach robots factory work using footage of thousands of people mopping floors and washing dishes.

The $55 million deal on Thursday is the largest initial funding round a German startup has ever raised, Microagi CEO Bercan Kilic claimed in a post on X. The 10-month-old AI startup has paid more than 20,000 people across 15 countries to film themselves working to sell the footage to robotics labs, according to its data arm’s website.

“It’s one-billionth of what Europe needs,” Kilic told Sifted.

Rather than building robots or AI models, the startup uses cameras and gloves with sensors to gather motion data of human workers performing chores, The Next Web reported. Microagi sends the data to other companies to teach their robotics systems how to perform factory jobs.

“We put our engineers on site with each customer, and the system learns from their real operations and feeds that back into the next run,” Microagi CTO Nico Nussbaum told Sifted. “So every month we’re there they pull a little further ahead of their competitors.”

Microagi did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Shift, the startup’s data arm, offered to clean New York City apartments for free when it announced its launch in June.

“Here’s how it works. Book a shift cleaning. A vetted shift operator comes to your home wearing one of our devices. They clean. They leave. You pay nothing,” Shift’s now-viral post on X said. “In exchange, we record the cleaning.”

Shift announced free private chef services in San Francisco on Tuesday. “Whether you want a steak dinner or a lobster lunch, shift is making it free,” Shift said on X.

Personal data is “anonymized before the recording is processed,” the data arm added.

“At Microagi, we study how to scale physical intelligence to hundreds of real-life deployments by leveraging in-the-wild human data,” Zeno Hamers, a Microagi researcher, said on X. “The problem is huge: Europe is lacking behind in the AI race, has a degrading industrial base and an aging population. We only have 16 months left before RSI [recursively self-improving AI] leaves us behind.”

“On 1 January 2025, the median age of the EU’s population reached 44.9 years,” according to Eurostat. A European Commission report stated, “Based on current population projections and assuming constant educational attainment levels, the EU workforce is expected to shrink by up to 18.8 million by 2050.”

Meanwhile, the median age in the U.S. increased from 39.2 to 39.4 years old between 2024 and 2025, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. China’s median age, by comparison, stands at 40.6 years in 2026, Worldometer data shows. The U.S. and China are currently the major players in the global AI race.

China is projected to reach a median age of about 52.1 in 2050, compared to about 41.9 in the United States, per Database.earth.