Flexion

The brain every humanoid robot is missing

May 18th, 2026

Missed the news?

Last week, we announced our Boston + Tech Week lineup, including AI Day #NYTechWeek - a day + night experience at NY Tech Week built around the people and products shaping the future.

We’re hosting three firesides with founders and executives from Bilt, Bolt.new, and Graphite (acquired by Cursor), followed by a 30-person dinner for product, design, and engineering leaders, and capped with an afterparty featuring Ian Asher.

See you there.

Ethan and Arek 🦄

Flexion is building the autonomy stack that gives humanoid robots the ability to understand tasks in natural language, plan and execute multi-step workflows, and adapt to real-world conditions with no human in the loop. The platform is designed to run across hardware from different humanoid manufacturers without modification.

Check it out: flexion.ai

Flexion offers annual per-robot software licensing. Flexion sells to OEM robot manufacturers and enterprise operators, positioning itself as a horizontal intelligence layer across the humanoid ecosystem rather than a vertically integrated hardware company. Think of Microsoft's strategy as opposed to Apple’s.

  • Raised a $50 million Series A led by DST Global Partners, with participation from NVentures (Nvidia's venture arm), Redalpine, Prosus Ventures, and Moonfire Ventures

  • Actively piloting with major OEM customers

  • 45 employees across the Zurich R&D headquarters, with ongoing expansion efforts in the Bay Area

Flexion is actively hiring across AI engineering and hardware engineering in Zurich and the Bay. 

The Flexion team came from the same ETH Zurich lab, each holding different academic titles. Simultaneously, Rudin and Hoeller were working at Nvidia with simulation and reinforcement learning tools for robotics.

While working directly with companies building humanoids, they kept seeing the same components built and obstacles hit independently. They realized the compute and data flywheel that unlocked LLMs had no equivalent in robotics. Flexion was founded to give humanoid manufacturers and operators a ready-made intelligence layer, so that they could focus on their hardware and deployment rather than reinventing the autonomy stack from scratch.

Bringing AI models into the physical world is the next AI frontier. 

Of the infinitely possible robot form factors, building generalized humanoid robots is the most ambitious. Fortunately, on the hardware front, the technology has quickly improved, with actuators that are more precise, battery systems that last longer, mechanical design that has become more robust, and bipedal platforms that can now navigate real environments and perform structured tasks at a level that would have seemed far-fetched five years ago. Instead, the bottleneck holding back deployment at scale is intelligence.

Robotic operating systems have been historically brittle. Humanoid robots look impressive in demos, but few can perform outside these controlled settings. With task-specific code and teleoperation pipelines, prior systems had hand-engineered behaviors that required significant reprogramming when conditions shifted. At scale, that created a landscape where every manufacturer was independently building an autonomy stack from scratch, often similar to each other, but not general enough to ensure high robot uptime.

Flexion is building this layer. Its autonomy stack handles natural language task understanding with multi-step workflow execution, creating real-world adaptation across humanoid robots regardless of their physical configuration. That means robots with differing numbers of joints or sensor layouts across manufacturers can work with Flexion. The company has correctly identified and bet that a horizontal software platform sitting above the hardware competition captures value regardless of which robot body wins in any given segment.

Flexion is building the software layer that enables humanoid robots to perform real-world tasks with minimal human input.

Zooming out, humanoid robotics has crossed a threshold. Roughly 50 companies have declared ambitions in humanoid robotics, but fewer than ten have advanced to scaled pilots or precommercial deployments. Meanwhile, robotics-related venture investment exceeded $10.7 billion globally as of late 2025, and the global humanoid robotics market could hit $38 billion by 2035.

Looking even further, others forecast the total market could surpass $5 trillion by 2050. Flexion's per-robot licensing model scales directly with the number of robots in the field, a number expected to reach nearly 3 billion by 2060, and the inbound interest from OEMs, enterprise operators, and the aforementioned investors, including Nvidia’s venture arm, is signal that the market has already recognized the gap being filled.

The conversation has shifted from whether humanoids will be useful to when and at what scale. The defining challenge ahead is building the data flywheel fast enough. More robots deployed means more training data, which leads to stronger models, which in turn attract more deployments. Whoever builds the shared intelligence layer first captures the compounding advantage, and Flexion has the architecture and the people to make a serious run at it.

ICYMI: We recently announced our official investor syndicate. Check out the announcement post for more details on how to invest in our deals.

Is this week's company a future unicorn?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.