David Reger’s $7 billion Neura Robotics wants to be the Apple of physical AI, building not only an army of industrial and humanoid robots, but also their operating software system and the “gyms” where they will train. Nvidia, Amazon and Tether are onboard to the tune of $1.4 billion.
“I want Neura to become the largest taxpayer in Europe one day,” enthuses 38-year-old robotics entrepreneur David Reger.
His ambitious startup Neura Robotics was founded in 2019 in Metzingen, Germany, a town 20 miles south of Stuttgart. This region gave rise to automotive powerhouses like Mercedes-Benz, Porsche and Bosch. Neura builds cognitive or “thinking” robots, including humanoids, as well as the operating software for them. In June, Neura raised up to $1.4 billion in a financing round led by Tether, the controversial company behind the world’s largest stablecoin, a cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar. Nvidia, Amazon, Qualcomm, Bosch, Schaeffler and the European Investment Bank also invested.
The round valued Neura at about $7 billion, according to people familiar with the deal, putting it among Europe’s most valuable robotics startups. The company says most of the capital has already been transferred, with a smaller portion still dependent on performance milestones. Reger owns about 20% of it, making his stake worth nearly $1.5 billion.
One of Neura’s biggest boosters is Stephen J. George, whose Omaha-based investment firm InterAlpen Partners made its first investment in the company, worth $16 million, in 2023. An ex-Goldman banker, he previously ran eBay billionaire Jeff Skoll’s family office, Capricorn Investment Group. “Neura is Apple meets Mercedes-Benz,” says George, with a nod to the carmaker headquartered half an hour up the road.
The least conventional part of Neura’s strategy is what Reger calls robot gyms, where his clients can rent dedicated training cells equipped with simulation environments and tracking technology to train the robots it buys from Neura for specific jobs. Whatever one robot learns can then be stored on Neura’s cloud-based platform, Neuraverse, and transferred to other machines the customer owns. Reger wants companies to be able to trade or lease those skills, too.
Of course many of Neura’s grand ambitions have yet to be realized. Most of its actual revenue, which the company declined to disclose, still comes from more conventional collaborative robots (known as cobots), including mechanical arms, mobile carts and their combinations. Neura’s latest available financial statement from Germany’s Company Register dates back to 2022, where it reported a loss of close to $7 million. A spokesperson for the company says that its orderbook now exceeds $1.1 billion, half relating to its existing cobot fleet. Neura also claims it has $11 billion in its pipeline, “comprising signed agreements with varying levels of commitment.” According to the spokesperson, approximately 80% of this long-term pipeline relates to humanoids, Neura gyms and Neuraverse.
On its website, Neura markets its 4NE1 humanoid robot as “Your Next Gen Humanoid Teammate.” The white and black cyborg, which the startup is pinning most of its future on, stands 5 feet 11 inches tall, weighs 176 lbs and looks like it came out of central casting for a dystopian sci-fi thriller.
Chinese robot makers have already shipped 19,100 humanoids, or 97%, of all humanoids sold worldwide in the first half of the year. Figure, the Silicon Valley humanoid maker, was valued at $39 billion last year, more than five times what Neura is worth now. German-born Reger still believes his company can put Europe back in a technology race it has mostly watched from the sidelines.
His motivation goes back to San Francisco, 2009. That is when his family urged him to do social work before starting a career, so at 21, just after the financial crisis, he moved to California and became a case manager for homeless people. He had planned to stay in the U.S., but what he saw on the job sent him home after a year and a half with a newfound appreciation for Germany’s social safety net.
That safety net depends on workers, and Germany is running out of them. As baby boomers retire, the country’s workforce is set to shrink by about 4.3 million people by 2036, according to the German Economic Institute. Robots will have to fill part of that gap. If Germany is going to depend on them, Reger argues, it should build them itself.
With the country currently dependent on critical resources from oil to semiconductors from abroad, Reger is looking for a rebalancing in AI-driven technology. “Europe cannot preserve its prosperity, its social systems and its relevance in the world if we only consume the next generation of technology from somewhere else,” he says. “We have to create enormous new value here again. Physical AI gives us that opportunity.”
Born in 1988, Reger grew up near Rottweil in southwestern Germany, the eldest of 11 siblings. His father works at a nearby automotive supplier and his mother is a homemaker. As a boy, Reger spent his Saturdays at the plant cleaning machinery. He skipped university for a three-and-a-half-year apprenticeship as a mold maker, learning to build the tooling used to cast industrial parts.
He had never touched a robot when MABI, a family-owned Swiss machinery maker, hired him in 2011 and gave him a choice between working on robotics and 3-D printing. Reger picked robots first, figuring they might someday do the printing anyway. “I had no clue about robots,” he says. “I pretended I had a clue.” He taught himself at night from YouTube videos. Within a year, he says, his small team was demonstrating how to use a large robotic industrial arm at Automatica, Munich’s big automation fair.
In 2018, after seven years at MABI, Reger took a bigger idea to its board. Most factory robots then sat behind fences, repeating one task over and over. He wanted machines that could be taught new jobs, with what they learned stored on a shared software platform so engineers would not have to rebuild the automation every time. The board liked the idea but told him he was five or six years early. Reger thought waiting would make him late.
So instead, he partnered with Han’s Robot, a Shenzhen cobot maker backed by automation giant Han’s Laser Technology, to establish a German-based collaborative robotics venture, Han’s Robot Germany. He recruited about a dozen robotics scientists and engineers, including his colleagues at MABI, with expertise spanning AI, hardware, software and sensor systems. The Chinese company took a 70% stake in the venture, which combined Han’s robotic hardware with the German team’s expertise in software, sensors and developing machines for customers’ specific needs. It was eventually renamed Neura.
In June 2023, Reger arranged for a group of European investors to buy out Han’s ownership for $11 million. By then, ChatGPT had made AI the hottest trade, and investors were looking for ways to put it to work in the physical world. A month after the Chinese sold their stake, Neura announced another $55 million raise from a group of European investors at an undisclosed valuation.
Why would China’s Hans sell its stake at such an apparent discount? Perhaps because Neura continued to buy a bulk of its collaborative industrial robots and components from Han’s Robot, which was since renamed Huayan Robotics. According to an IPO prospectus filed by Huayan in March 2026, Neura was also Huayan’s largest customer as of September 2025 and in turn supplied Huayan with high-performance reducers, the precision gearboxes that move a robot’s joints. Huayan built them into the robots it made for Neura and was free to put them in robots for other customers. Despite the cozy relationship, Reger insists that “neither Han’s Robot nor Han’s Laser retains equity or rights to Neura’s IP.”
To date, Neura has mostly prospered by selling robot arms that list for about $18,500 to $44,000 at European resellers, wheeled robots that carry parts around a factory, which sell for about $50,000, and machines that combine the two. Reger is vague about how many machines he has sold since 2021, when Neura launched its first robot. He estimates 5,000 to 8,000 of them and says many are sold under the brands of other robot makers, who are its partners. Among them: Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Omron Robotics and Taiwan’s Delta Electronics, which invested in Neura in 2024 via its Dutch subsidiary.
Why would a robot maker sell someone else’s technology? When the partnerships began, nothing comparable was for sale, answers Reger. Neura “owns the stack for everything that’s core,” he says, including motors, encoders and safety detection sensors.
Owning doesn’t mean making. Some of the parts for Neura’s humanoids come from German suppliers like Bosch and Schaeffler, which provides Neura with actuators, a.k.a. “the muscles of robots”. These devices allow humanoid joints to move and can amount to a half of a robot’s component costs.
The startup’s other partners include Nvidia, which supplies simulation technology and compute behind Neura’s AI, Amazon for cloud-based Neuraverse, and Qualcomm, whose processors Neura is building into the robots’ “brain and nervous system.” Tether, whose dollar-pegged stablecoin USDT is widely used for trading and payments in emerging markets but has also become a popular vehicle for illicit finance, wants to put its wallet software inside Neura’s robots. Eventually robots could be able to transact with each other.
“Autonomous machines need the ability to process information locally, make decisions, and transact without relying on centralized intermediaries,” says Tether’s billionaire chief executive, Paolo Ardoino. Reger shares his vision. “The future will be that every robot has its own wallet,” he says.
Demand for humanoid robots could be immense. Reger claims 12,000 companies contacted Neura in the last year, mostly about its humanoids. He figures it currently has the ability to make only enough robots for about 100 customers. “Companies are willing to pay $300,000 to $550,000 just for “a nice demo,” says Reger, referring to the cost of a single humanoid robot itself ($110,000 for Neura’s latest model) plus the annual fees associated with its training, deployment and maintenance. Manning humanoid pilot programs for customers is resource intense. It typically requires Neura to send its own engineers to someone else’s factory, which disrupts any inhouse progress on improving humanoid technology.
So Reger decided that Neura would build facilities, or gyms, where companies could rent space and have their own workers train the robots themselves. Unlike large language models, which learn largely from information available online, robots need to learn how to interact with the physical world. To pick up a car part, for instance, a robot must learn where to reach, how firmly to grip it and how to put it in the right place. That requires demonstrations and repeated practice, explains investor George.
Neura’s robot gyms are expensive. The company and its partners have committed $19 million to a facility at the Munich Airport. And that didn’t even include staffing costs. The gym is already operational, and customers are already booking training cells—some as many as 20—for at least a year, says Reger. Rent varies depending on the equipment and data sharing arrangements, but can run into the tens of thousands of dollars.
Universities are another part of Reger’s plan. Research institutions are short of funding and losing top PhDs to startups, he says. A robot gym on campus would give them access to machines they might otherwise struggle to afford, while providing Neura with researchers to help train its robots. The Technical University of Munich is a partner in the airport facility, and a 3,000-square-meter site is being developed on RWTH Aachen University’s Melaten research campus.
Neura expects to have five gyms running by year-end: three in Germany, one in China and one in the U.S., and has 10 more in development. The U.S. plans include facilities in Detroit and San Diego.
Data collected during training can be stored on Neura’s “brain accounts” on Neuraverse, allowing companies to transfer what their robots have learned to other machines in their fleets or eventually sell those skills to other businesses. “Ultimately, our goal is that once a skill has been learned, it does not have to be engineered again for every individual robot,” says Reger.
Neura’s robot gyms will have competition. Investor and supplier Schaeffler operates its own humanoid gym in Erlangen, Germany, where it is training Hexagon’s AEON human robot for factory work. It has also invested $10 million in another Neura rival, Agility Robotics, and is using a few of its Digit humanoids to handle materials in its U.S. factories.
Neura’s robots and their promised capabilities are impressive, but when it comes to actual functionality its humanoids are still finding their footing. At the high-profile unveiling of 4NE1 at Automatica in June 2025, Reger had only a motionless prototype to show. A company spokesperson said an unexpected highway closure had delayed the arrival of the working robot. A year later, at the Computex technology show in Taipei in June 2026, a newer version of the same robot made it onstage carrying a tray of Qualcomm hardware, only to collapse backward moments later. Qualcomm blamed a communication glitch, saying it had triggered the robot’s built-in “safe-collapse” sequence, designed to protect people and equipment nearby.
Neura’s latest humanoid, Gen 3.5, costs an estimated $110,000, or according to the company’s website, $62,000 if you purchase 20 robots or more. Neura refuses to say how many humanoids it has actually built and deployed, but Reger says his startup will be able to deliver 5 million cognitive robots by 2030, including humanoids.
The International Federation of Robotics counted just about 7,000 full-size humanoid robots sold worldwide last year. Many were bought not to work but to generate training data for AI models.
China is leading the humanoid race. Shanghai-based AgiBot accounted for 44% of global humanoid shipments in the first half of 2026, or about 8,400 robots, according to the market research firm Smart Analytics Global. Runner-up Unitree, based in Hangzhou, sells its basic G1, a stripped-down humanoid that can walk but lacks dexterous hands and cannot be programmed by its owner, for $13,500, roughly an eighth of the 4NE1’s price. In 2025, Unitree booked $253 million in revenue and shipped more than 5,500 humanoids, though research firm SemiAnalysis estimates that only about 250 of its humanoids are doing real work. After Unitree listed in Shanghai in August 2026, investors briefly valued the company at $66 billion. Its market value has since plunged to $24 billion, as the gulf between enthusiasm for humanoid robots and the machines’ actual commercial use has become harder to ignore.
American humanoid makers have plenty left to prove, too. San Jose, California-based Figure has built about 1,000 humanoids, but it’s not clear how many have been deployed and where. Tesla is now building several hundred Optimus humanoid robots per week, but the robots can’t yet reliably handle a wide range of tasks, according to a recent report from The Information.
One serious headwind in Neura’s near future comes from international trade barriers. In July, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission added foreign-made “advanced robotic devices” to its Covered List, a national-security roster of equipment barred from the FCC authorization required for sale in America. The category covers humanoids, four-legged and autonomous mobile robots. Fixed industrial arms, a good chunk of Neura’s business, and previously authorized models are exempt. A foreign maker can still bring a new robot to market if it receives “conditional approval” granted after the Department of War reviews its manufacturing and supply chain. Neura told Forbes it is “developing manufacturing capacity in Detroit for wheeled robots and humanoids, targeting 2027,” but until then it will need that clearance for its new machines.
Undoubtedly, Reger’s bigger ambition is at home. For more than a century, the world has driven machines built in this corner of Germany. Now he wants it to build the machines that do the world’s work. “Europe has the engineering talent, industrial knowledge, manufacturing base and thousands of companies that understand the physical world,” he says. “If we combine that with AI and move fast enough, I believe we can create an industry that becomes bigger than automotive.”
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