Motion, the company behind what it says is Europe’s first Humanoids-as-a-Service (HaaS) platform, has raised a $2 million pre-seed round led by Extantia Capital, with participation from Norrsken Evolve.
The funding will take Motion’s five live pilots with Belgian industrial, warehouse and logistics players into full production, expand the team and grow its robot fleet, starting in the Benelux.
On factory floors today, Motion’s humanoids are being trained to load goods into crates, pack containers into boxes and place components on conveyor belts, side by side with the human teams they support.
Customers pay one monthly fee with no upfront capital, covering everything adoption requires: data collection, robot selection, task training, IT integration, fleet management, financing, insurance, compliance and maintenance.
The stakes are high for Europe’s factories, which are running short of hands. In ManpowerGroup’s 2026 survey of 39,000 employers, 72 percent of manufacturers reported difficulty filling roles, with machine and plant operators among the most widespread shortages.
The gap reaches beyond output: Europe’s industrial ambitions, from reshoring to the clean transition, depend on production capacity the continent cannot currently staff.
China has already responded, deploying humanoid robots in its factories at scale, with Goldman Sachs expecting annual shipments above 250,000 by 2030 and the market reaching $38 billion by 2035.
Europe has no equivalent path to adoption: the expertise to select, train, integrate and operate a humanoid simply does not exist inside most factories.
Alexander Stevens, founder and CEO of Motion, who exited his previous company, ESG software provider Greenomy, in 2025, says: “Europe has a robot adoption problem. Adoption fails on financing, risk and compliance long before it fails on technology.
“So we take everything that stands between a factory and its first humanoid and turn it into one predictable monthly fee. Hiring a robot should be as easy as hiring a person.”
Motion’s Field Deployment Engineers take each customer through every step from idea to working process. Motion then manages the fleet, finances and insures every robot and keeps it compliant, with fees that adapt to the number of robots as the fleet scales up or down with production.
Two things set the model apart: Motion is OEM-agnostic, selecting whichever humanoid fits the task best so customers never bet on a single vendor.
Every customer benefits from Motion’s deployment experience across its entire network, while each customer’s data remains its own on Motion’s secure European software layer, with cyber security built into every deployment.
Yair Reem, partner at Extantia Capital, says: “The climate transition is ultimately a physical transformation: factories must produce and deploy vastly more batteries, heat pumps, grid equipment and other clean technologies.
“Yet industrial growth is increasingly constrained by labour shortages, lost expertise and inefficient production. By backing Motion, Extantia is investing in the infrastructure needed to scale climate technologies faster, while making European manufacturing more efficient, resilient and globally competitive.”
Alex Bakir, general partner at Norrsken Evolve, says: “Rebuilding our labour force is essential for Europe. What convinced us to jump on board was Motion’s holistic vision on how to keep Europe building with robotics at the core.”
Motion is also opening a partner program for system integrators and automation specialists, who will deploy humanoids for their own customers on Motion’s platform.
