Frank Thelen joins robot start-up Robco

Up to now, it has mainly been large companies that have used robots in production. The start-up Robco wants to make them available to SMEs too.

Robco is only one year old and has now attracted a well-known investor: Frank Thelen is joining the Munich-based company with his Freigeist fund. The start-up has completed a series B financing round amounting to 6.5 million euros. Robco wants to enable small and medium-sized companies to use robot modules that can be combined in different ways and reprogrammed for specific purposes. Large companies have long relied on robotic support, but the technology is very expensive.

Thelen sees Robco as an opportunity for SMEs to "keep up in terms of automation", as the investor told the Handelsblatt said. The start-up was founded by Constantin Dresel, Paul Maroldt and Roman Hölzl, who met at the Technical University of Munich and developed Robco's technology. "We will use the new funds to equip further customers with our robotic solutions in the coming months following our first successful industrial projects," Hölzl told Handelsblatt.