Undisclosed · Pre-Seed · Robotics · London, UK and Sydney, Australia
Reimagine Robotics, an industrial robotics company founded by former Google DeepMind engineers, has disclosed that its first phase was funded by an undisclosed pre-seed round from Fly Ventures, firstminute capital and angel investors. The company revealed the backing as it emerged from stealth on 3 August, alongside robots designed to be trained and corrected by workers on the factory floor.
The disclosed pre-seed financed the company’s initial product, team and customer-testing phase. Reimagine said its next stage includes a new fundraising process, so that planned financing is separate from the backing covered here.
Turning factory workers into robot trainers
Reimagine’s system is intended to let operators show a robot how to perform a task, watch its attempt and physically correct the machine when it fails, without calling in specialist programmers each time a process changes. The company says it has already tested the approach in advanced manufacturing and electronics disassembly. One deployment tended 3D printers overnight, while another used three robots to help recover critical materials from used hard drives.
In the hard-drive project, Reimagine says it reduced the time needed to prototype and test a new robot behaviour from roughly one day to around ten minutes. Business Insider reported that CEO Jonathan Scholz sees this in-field “post-training” as a response to robotics’ shortage of real-world training data. The commercial mechanism is practical: if the people who understand a production line can adapt a robot themselves, deployments may cover variable tasks that are too costly or slow to reprogramme centrally.
That model still has an execution test. Customer-led teaching must remain reliable across changing equipment, materials and safety conditions, and each deployment must produce reusable learning rather than a bespoke integration project. Reimagine’s claim that faster testing can pull robots into process design is therefore central to whether the platform can scale beyond pilots.
DeepMind experience meets industrial deployment
Scholz founded and led Google DeepMind’s Applied Robotics team in London for seven years before co-founding Reimagine in April 2025 with former colleagues Oleg Sushkov, Akhil Raju and Misha Denil. The company says the team spent its first year building the core product and testing it with several partners. Its announced next phase is to expand the team, put robots into more workplaces and make each deployment faster and more reliable.
That sequence matters more than the undisclosed cheque size. The pre-seed financed a move from research experience to working factory trials; the next fundraising phase will test whether those trials can become a repeatable deployment model.
