Extend Robotics raises £2.6m led by Skyworks VC Fund with Neo Venture (Europe)
This article covers Extend Robotics, a robotics startup, raising £2.6m in a pre-seed funding round to expand a Result-as-a-Service offering that lets manufacturers hire robotic work by outcome rather than buying machines. The funding is intended to scale its remote operator network and roll out an immersive teleoperation platform across UK and European factories, supporting manufacturers seeking outcome-based automation for roles that are hard to automate.
Extend Robotics has raised £2.6 million in a pre-seed funding round to expand a Result-as-a-Service offering that lets manufacturers hire robotic work by outcome rather than buying machines. The funding — led by Skyworks Venture Capital Fund with participation from Neo Venture (Europe) and Zip Capital — aims to scale the company’s remote operator network and roll its immersive teleoperation platform across UK and European factories.
Why it matters
European manufacturing is grappling with labour shortages in roles that are hard to automate: small-batch production, rework, maintenance and hazardous tasks. Extend Robotics’ model shifts the decision from a capital purchase to an operating contract, pricing against output and taking on cycle-time and success-rate risk. That changes how firms evaluate automation projects and could make robotics accessible to companies that lack the capital or confidence to buy equipment upfront.
Inside the product
Extend Robotics’ AMAS platform combines an immersive 3D teleoperation interface with AI assistance so operators without deep robotics training can control robot arms or humanoids remotely. Its Result-as-a-Service approach charges for completed tasks rather than hardware, with continuous operational data used to incrementally increase automation while customers continue to pay for output.
The company says the service is already live on production lines. At Adrian Scripps, a large UK apple grower, an Extend Robotics humanoid performs quality control on a working packing line. At Leyland Trucks the company has deployed robotics for fitting high-voltage Master Service Disconnect units and for spray painting custom components. Extend Robotics is hardware-neutral, was named an official integrator for Unitree Robotics in January, and was selected by NVIDIA for its Robotics Startup Showcase at GTC 2026. It was also one of twelve companies in the Google DeepMind Robotics Accelerator, which streamed the apple-packing deployment at its Demo Day.
Founded in 2021 by Chang Liu, a former Imperial College London postdoctoral researcher in aerial robotics, Extend Robotics is based in Reading and now serves 35 subscription customers across four sales regions, spanning automotive, aerospace, nuclear, robotics and agriculture. The company reports revenue doubling year on year for three consecutive years.
Who are the investors?
The £2.6 million pre-seed round was led by Skyworks Venture Capital Fund, with participation from Neo Venture (Europe) and Zip Capital. The investment will be used to scale the Result-as-a-Service offer across the UK and Europe and to develop a distributed remote operator network that can service production tasks without relocating staff to factory floors.
Investors backing the round are effectively underwriting operational risk — paying for the delivery of work rather than for machinery — which signals confidence in outcome-based commercial models for industrial robotics. The round provides capital to expand live deployments and to collect the operational data the company uses to iterate on AI-assisted autonomy.
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Founder perspective
In the announcement, Chang Liu, Founder and CEO at Extend Robotics, said:
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. So stop selling them robots. Sell them the work getting done, price it against the output, and carry the risk ourselves.
The bigger picture
Extend Robotics sits at the intersection of robotics, embodied AI and services-based commercial models. Outcome-based pricing and remote operation address two persistent barriers for manufacturers: the capital cost of robots and the shortage of nearby skilled operators. By enabling tasks to be performed from a distance, the model also opens industrial roles to a broader labour pool across the UK and Europe.
The deal aligns with broader trends in the UK robotics ecosystem — growing interest in robots-as-a-service and in solutions that blend human oversight with AI assistance — and follows recent platform-level endorsements from NVIDIA and DeepMind that help validate commercial paths for research-led robotics companies.
The funding adds another data point to how investors are approaching industrial automation: backing models that reduce upfront capital barriers for manufacturers while relying on operational scale and data to improve returns over time.
They've invested in Extend Robotics
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| Investors | Investment Focus | Startup Investments | Round Size | Connect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Skyworks Venture Capital Fund( ) | B2C | |||
 Zip Capital( ) | B2C | |||
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