Cortex 2.0 is designed to work across embodiments and applications. Source: Sereact
Sereact GmbH today said it has raised Series B funding of $110 million to scale its Cortex 2.0 “robotic brain” and support its entry into the U.S. market. The company has opened an office in Boston and is hiring local engineering, commercial, and application staffers.
“We bet early that you can’t build real robotics AI in a lab. You build it with a data flywheel fed by real deployments — shipping into production, living with the failures, and letting the model learn from what actually happens on the floor,” stated Dr. Ralf Gulde, co-founder and CEO of Sereact. “The numbers show it worked. Two hundred systems. One billion picks. One intervention per 53,000. Nobody else is close.”
Founded in 2021, Sereact said it builds physical AI for warehouses and manufacturing. Its Cortex brain runs across single-arm picking cells, dual-arm returns stations, and humanoid robots, as well as Sereact Lens, a 3D perception system for inventory and quality control.
The Stuttgart, Germany-based company‘s existing European customers include Daimler Truck, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, MS Direct, Active Ants, DeltiLog, Rohlik Group, and Austrian Post.
Sereact starts with AI for warehouse robots
“Sereact builds AI for robots that work in the physical world,” said the company. “Warehouses were the first deployment because no other environment provides the same combination of data points: billions of real interactions, every object shape imaginable, hard throughput constraints, and consequences when the robot gets it wrong.”
Sereact claimed that Cortex learns from picks of physical items in real-world conditions across customer sites that no simulation can reproduce. With the exception of the one in 53,000 that require remote human intervention, the robot can handle picks on its own, feeding data back into its model in a closed loop.
“Every successful pick, every failure, every recovery is captured with synchronized observations, robot state, gripper force feedback, and outcome — then filtered, prioritized by novelty and uncertainty, and used to update the model,” the company asserted. “Updated policies pass automated regression checks and roll out to the fleet. The loop closes. Data compounds. Coverage of the long tail expands.”
“Competitors are raising billions to train on simulated data and lab demos,” it added. “Sereact has spent five years training on real operations, at night, at peak, on the messy items that don’t look like anything the robot has seen before. It’s a gap that widens with every shift.”
Editor’s note: Physical AI, warehouse automation, and humanoid robots will be among the topics discussed at the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo next month in Boston. Register now to attend.
Cortex 2.0 anticipates outcomes before it moves
“Today’s Cortex sees and picks,” said Sereact. “Cortex 2.0 thinks first, then acts.”
Cortex 2.0 augments a vision-language-action (VLA) model with a world model. From the current state, it generates a set of potential trajectories; runs them against a learned model of physics and object behavior; and scores each one for stability, risk, and efficiency. The robot commits to the best-scored branch and updates the rollout in real time as the scene changes, explained the company.
“The shift is from try-and-see to plan-and-try,” Sereact said. “Today’s reactive policies, when they miss, tend to repeat the same motion and compound the failure.”
“Cortex 2.0 evaluates several outcomes first and rules out the bad ones before the arm moves — which is exactly what’s needed for the kind of work where contact matters: assembling a component under tension, placing a windshield wiper without scratching it, kitting parts that have to land in exactly the right orientation for the next station,” it added.
Cortex 2.0 plans in “visual latent space,” according to Sereact. While joint commands are tied to a specific robot’s kinematics, the pixels encode regularities about objects, contact, and motion that transfer across embodiments.
“The robot dreams in latent space,” said Marc Tuscher, co-founder and chief technology officer of Sereact. “We give it a form of imagination — the ability to anticipate how the world will respond before it moves.”
“We don’t build robots. We don’t sell services. We ship one thing: the model that runs on any robot,” he said. “Single arms, dual arms, humanoids, fixed cells — same brain across all of it. Hardware is becoming a commodity. The model isn’t.”
Sereact also noted that compute planning can be tuned to the task. The technology can provide more foresight when failure is expensive, such as in parcel packing, kitting, or placing fragile items. It could plan less when recovery is cheap, like for a regrasp on a missed pick. “Cortex 2.0 spends planning budget where it pays back,” it said.
Cortex is designed to learn from data from real-world experiences. Source: Sereact
Firms invest in the data flywheel
Headline led Sereact’s latest funding, which included participation from Bullhound Capital, Daphni, and Felix Capital. Existing investors Air Street Capital, Creandum (lead of Sereact’s 2025 Series A), and Point Nine all returned for the Series B round. The company has raised over $140 million to date.
“The physical AI opportunity is one of the largest we’ve seen in a generation, and we believe it will rewire global supply chains and manufacturing,” said Trevor Neff, growth partner at Headline.
“Behind great opportunities and great companies are great founders, and Ralf and Marc are building into that opportunity the right way: real deployments, real data, and a model that compounds and gets better with every single pick,” he added. “Customers love the product, which leads to continued expansion, only accelerating the data flywheel — this is why we are so excited to back Sereact.”
“After looking at a deluge of humanoid robotics companies, my fellow Partner Alon Kuperman and I were delighted to meet Ralf and Marc, the co-founders of Sereact, who have built an AI operating system that seamlessly retrofits into the world’s vast fleet of industrial robots already in action,” said Per Roman, founding partner at Bullhound Capital.
Antoine Nussenbaum, co-founder and investor at Felix Capital said: “We see Sereact as a new generation European champion, combining deep industrial know-how with world-class AI and robotics talent to tackle one of the hardest challenges in global supply chains. At its core is a powerful, compounding data moat, where every warehouse interaction makes the system smarter and harder to replicate.”
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