Robotic start-up with $8.5m of backing, cuts deployment to ‘weeks’
16 June 2025 
A European automation company has emerged from a stealth phase with $8.5m in seed funding and the promise that it can cut the time it takes to set up robotic cells from months to weeks. Slovenian-headquartered Sunrise Robotics is offering two-armed robot cells designed to handle high-mix, low-volume tasks such as cutting, welding and bolting, currently performed by human workers. It is targeting SME manufacturers producing fewer than 100,000 parts a year.
The company first uses 3D cameras to capture data of the task being performed by human workers and uses this to build a digital twin of the process and to train an AI model that can control the robots to perform the task, in combination with conventional coding. As the system learns new skills, it should be even quicker to deploy similar applications in the future.
Most of the standardised cells’ components are off-the-shelf items that are easy to build and maintain. The cells incorporate 360-degree radar capabilities, local edge computers which can run complex models in real time without needing remote data centres, and embedded safety functions. They are designed to fit into the space occupied by existing human-operated workstations.
The cells differ from traditional industrial robots that can be time-consuming and costly to install, and are often tailor-made for one particular application. The new cells are shipped ready-to-go and can be operating within hours of arriving on site.
Sunrise Robotics has been set up by three entrepreneurs who have worked in Silicon Valley and have experience of robotics, AI and manufacturing. They spent months touring European factories to determine their needs before writing any code.
The start-up currently employs around 25 people in Ljubljana and in other locations across Europe. It expects to deploy up to 15 cells by the end of this year and has already signed letters-of-intent with around ten customers. Early adopters are reporting productivity gains and a reduced reliance on hard-to-find labour.
For example, Andrew Buss, managing director of the UK electronics manufacturer, Asteelflash, says that the technology has helped it to “adopt cutting-edge innovation at a remarkable speed. Just a few months after the initial data collection, we had a fully-trained, operationally-intelligent robot up-and-running with hours of delivery.”
The $8.5m seed funding round has been led by the London-based venture capital firm, Plural, which was set up by a group of start-up founders. One of them, Carina Namih, who founded the mRNA pioneer HelixNano in San Franciso in 2013 at the age of 23, says that her previous, frustrating experiences with deploying robots were what “made the Sunrise vision click immediately. At Helix, we explored every automation tool on the market. What we found was that the real bottleneck wasn’t hardware, but deployment. Systems were brittle, painfully slow to install, and broke down the moment the production line changed.
“Sunrise fixes that, not just with better code, but with a fundamentally different product architecture,” she explains. “It’s closer to a self-driving car than a traditional robot – modular, sensor-rich, trained in simulation, and capable of learning on the job. Their end-to-end stack integrates perception, motion planning, safety, and control in a way that’s both deeply engineered and obsessively practical.”
Sunrise plans to use its new funding to expand its team across Europe, improve its AI systems, and scale production of its robotic cells.
