Extend Robotics raises £2.6 million to sell factory work, not robots
What's the deal? Extend RoboticsDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a UK embodied-AI company, has closed a £2.6 million early-stage round led by Skyworks Venture Capital Fund, with Neo Venture (Europe)Dealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and Zip Capital participating. The money will scale its Result-as-a-Service offering across UK and European industry and expand its remote operator network.
What's the endgame? Instead of selling robots, Extend Robotics sells completed work, priced against output and scaled with demand. Its AMAS platform lets an operator without a robotics background control a robot arm or humanoid remotely through an immersive 3D interface, with AI handling routine portions of the task.
Why now? European manufacturing faces a widening labour shortage, much of it in work conventional automation cannot absorb: small-batch, high-mix, rework, and hazardous operations in nuclear, aerospace, and high-voltage settings. Extend Robotics targets this gap with human-robot collaboration rather than full autonomy.
"Every manufacturer we talk to has jobs they cannot fill and a finance director who will not sign off on a robot that might not work," said Chang Liu, founder and chief executive officer. "So stop selling them robots. Sell them the work getting done, price it against the output, and carry the risk ourselves."
The model is already in production. At Adrian ScrippsDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, one of the UK's largest apple growers, an Extend Robotics humanoid runs quality control on a live packing line — a deployment streamed from the floor at the Google DeepMind Robotics Accelerator Demo Day in September, where the company was one of 12 selected for the three-month programme.
By the numbers: Extend Robotics now serves 35 subscription customers across four sales regions, spanning automotive, aerospace, nuclear, robotics, and agriculture. Revenue has doubled year on year for three consecutive years.
The remote interface also widens who can do industrial work. A task at a plant in North West England can be performed by an operator elsewhere in the UK or Europe, without relocation and without entering a paint booth, glovebox, or live high-voltage cell.
Early deployments point to the range. At Leyland TrucksDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, the company trained a robot to fit high-voltage Master Service Disconnect units — previously a high-risk live-electrical job — with a second deployment handling spray painting of custom components. Extend Robotics is hardware-neutral and was named an official integrator for Unitree Robotics in January; NVIDIA picked it as one of five for its Robotics Startup Showcase at GTC 2026.
The signal: Pricing robotics against outcomes rather than hardware reframes automation as an operating cost, not a capital bet — and shifts cycle-time and success-rate risk onto the vendor. For manufacturers wary of unproven deployments, that may lower the barrier to putting robots on the line at all.
Read more: extendrobotics.com
Image credit: Extend Robotics
