If you want the short answer: Wayve, Humanoid, CMR Surgical, Dexory, Oxa, Automata, Machenta and Chemify are the UK robotics companies raising the most money and doing the most interesting work in 2026, across self-driving software, humanoid factory robots, surgical systems, warehouse scanning, laboratory automation and robotic chemistry.
The longer answer is more useful, because the UK robotics sector is not one market. It is a dozen small ones, each with its own buyers, its own regulator and its own route to revenue.
A warehouse robot sells against a labour cost. A surgical robot sells against a hospital procurement cycle and an FDA clearance. A fruit-picking robot sells against the cost and availability of seasonal pickers. Lumping them together is how most "top robotics companies" lists go wrong.
This piece covers the sector numbers first, then 19 companies with what they actually build and what they actually raised, then the hubs and the government money sitting behind them. Every figure is attributed. Where sources disagree, that is said rather than smoothed over.
How big is the UK robotics sector in 2026?
It depends entirely on where you draw the line, and the two most-quoted datasets draw it in different places.
Tracxn counts 357 UK robotics companies with $2.2bn (£1.6bn) raised between them since the sector began, as summarised by Cambridge Innovation Capital. Of those, 111 have taken equity funding and only 27 have reached Series A or beyond.
Beauhurst, which classifies more broadly, counts 3,036 active robotics companies in the UK on its own robotics dataset. Just 105 of those are also tagged as AI companies, which Beauhurst itself says is more a classification gap than a real figure, since plenty of robotics firms embed machine learning without calling themselves an AI business.
Pick whichever number suits your argument, but know which one you are using.
The 2026 funding picture
UK robotics companies raised $258m (£189.3m) across 12 rounds in the first eight months of 2026, according to Tracxn data reported by UKTN in August. That compares with $150m across eight rounds in all of 2025, and $37.4m across 19 rounds in 2024.
Read that sequence again. Fewer cheques, much bigger cheques.
Two deals, Humanoid's $152m Series A and Automata's $45m Series C, made up 76% of everything UK robotics raised in 2026 to late August. The sector's annual total is currently decided by two or three cap tables.
That has since shifted again. In October 2026, Imperial College spinout Machenta came out of stealth with a $40m seed round, the largest ever raised by a UK robotics company at seed stage, and CMR Surgical took a $400m preferred equity investment from Stryker.
Beauhurst's narrower AI-robotics slice tells a steadier story: £869m raised since 2015 across 186 rounds, with a record £254m across 36 fundraisings in 2025. On that measure 46% of the cohort is still at seed stage.
Cambridge takes the money, London has the companies
The geography is lopsided in a way worth understanding before you move anywhere.
Cambridge robotics companies have raised $1.3bn (£954m) all-time, across just 13 rounds and 12 companies, on the same Tracxn figures. That is more than London and Bristol combined.
London has 103 robotics companies and 75 rounds, but only $582m (£427m) raised. More businesses, much less capital per business.
Cambridge's lead is concentration, not breadth. A handful of large rounds at a handful of companies, CMR Surgical chief among them, carries the whole figure. Machenta's King's Cross lab, funded at $40m, narrows the gap slightly.
Where the UK actually sits on robot adoption
This is the uncomfortable part, and it explains most of what government is now doing.
The UK had 101 industrial robots per 10,000 workers in 2020, against 932 in South Korea, 390 in Japan and 255 in the USA, on figures published in the government's own Smart Machines 2035 report.
Installations have gone backwards since. The International Federation of Robotics recorded 2,500 new industrial robot installations in the UK in 2024, down 35% on 2023, placing the UK 19th worldwide. The 2023 peak was itself inflated by the super-deduction tax break, which ended after the first quarter of that year.
A word of caution if you see a newer density figure quoted. Several trade bodies circulate numbers between 98 and 119 per 10,000 with no year and no source attached. The IFR sells the current data in its paid World Robotics report and does not publish a UK density rank for free.
19 UK robotics startups worth knowing
A quick reference first, then the detail. Funding figures are the most recent confirmable from a named source, not aggregator estimates.
| Company | Base | What it builds | Most recent funding |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wayve | London | Self-driving software | $1.2bn Series D, Feb 2026 |
| Humanoid | London | Humanoid and wheeled factory robots | $152m Series A, Jul 2026 |
| CMR Surgical | Cambridge | Versius keyhole surgery robot | $400m from Stryker, Oct 2026 |
| Dexory | Wallingford | Warehouse scanning robots | $165m announced, Oct 2025 |
| Oxa | Oxford | Industrial autonomous driving | $103m Series D first close, Mar 2026 |
| Chemify | Glasgow | Robotic chemical synthesis | £22m grants, Sep 2026 |
| Automata | London | Lab automation benches | $45m Series C, Jan 2026 |
| Machenta | London | One-shot robot learning models | $40m seed, Oct 2026 |
| Dogtooth Technologies | Melbourn, Cambs | Soft-fruit harvesting robots | Over £14m, Jul 2026 |
| Slamcore | London | Visual positioning for vehicles | $14m, May 2026 |
| Arctoris | Abingdon | Remote robotic drug-discovery labs | £14.0m total to date |
| Fieldwork Robotics | Cambridge | Raspberry-picking robots | £2.5m Seed+, Apr 2026 |
| AUAR | UK | Robotic timber house micro-factories | £5.1m, Jun 2025 |
| Q-Bot | London | Underfloor insulation robots | EMV-led raise, Jun 2025 |
| HausBots | Birmingham | Wall-climbing inspection robots | £1.5m seed, Sep 2022 |
| Open Bionics | Bristol | 3D-printed bionic hands | $5.9m Series A, Jan 2019 |
| Touchlab | Edinburgh | Electronic skin for robots | £1m ARIA contract, Nov 2025 |
| Robotiz3d | Liverpool | Road defect scanning and sealing | About £200k pre-seed, Dec 2024 |
| Kinematic Trees | Sheffield | Robot-agnostic software layer | £585k pre-seed, Jul 2026 |
Self-driving and general-purpose robots
Wayve is the biggest robotics business the UK has produced, even though most people file it under automotive. Founded in Cambridge in 2017 by Amar Shah and Alex Kendall, now headquartered in London, it trains an end-to-end driving model it calls the AI Driver, using camera data rather than HD maps or lidar.
It raised a $1.2bn Series D in February 2026, co-led by Eclipse, Balderton and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, taking total funding to about $1.5bn at an $8.6bn valuation. In September 2026 it put 15 safety-driver-supervised robotaxis on London roads with Uber.
Humanoid is two years old and already a unicorn. Founded in London in 2024 by Artem Sokolov, it builds the HMND 01 platform in bipedal and wheeled versions, running its own KinetIQ software on NVIDIA Jetson Thor compute.
Its $152m Series A in July 2026, led by Prime Movers Lab with Bosch and Schaeffler participating, valued it at $1.35bn. Bosch is also its contract manufacturer, and Schaeffler signed a binding deal to deploy 1,000 to 2,000 wheeled units by 2032. Treat the company's claimed 34,000 pre-orders with care, as it has not been independently verified.
Machenta is the research bet. Founded in 2025 by Imperial professor Edward Johns and PhD student Vitalis Vosylius, it trains robot models entirely in simulation so a robot can learn a new task from a single human demonstration.
Eleven people, no customers, no product, $40m from Creandum and Union Square Ventures. Johns calls the output "physical vibe coding". Whether that is visionary or early is the open question.
Oxa, the Oxford spinout formerly called Oxbotica, took a different route from Wayve. Rather than chase public roads, it sells autonomy for repetitive industrial driving at ports, airports, factories and solar farms, on 20-plus vehicle types and without relying on GPS.
It closed a $103m first tranche of its Series D in March 2026, including £37m from the UK National Wealth Fund, with NVIDIA's venture arm NVentures taking part. Named customers include DHL, Vantec and bp.
Warehouses, factories and the software behind them
Dexory builds tall autonomous robots that patrol warehouse aisles, scan every pallet position and feed the readings into a digital twin called DexoryView. Founded in 2015 as BotsAndUs by Andrei Danescu, Adrian Negoita and Oana Jinga, it runs its UK operation from Wallingford in Oxfordshire.
Its October 2025 Series C was announced as $165m in total, with a $100m equity portion led by Eurazeo, followed by an £8.5m British Business Bank investment in March 2026. Customers named publicly include GXO, Maersk, DHL, Samsung and Stellantis. Note that Dexory now calls Nashville its US headquarters.
Slamcore sells the perception layer rather than the robot. Spun out of Imperial College in 2017 by Professor Andrew Davison and colleagues, its software uses a single stereo camera to track where forklifts and vehicles are inside a building, with no beacons, floor markers or GPS.
It raised $14m in May 2026, with Rockwell Automation's venture arm ROKStar joining Toyota Ventures, MMC, Amadeus and IP Group. Its own press release gives total funding as both $40m and $45m in different places, so treat any total with suspicion.
Kinematic Trees is the newest name here. Founded in 2025 by Sheffield computational neuroscientist Dr Stuart Wilson and Daniel Camilleri, it is building a robot-agnostic software layer so the same capabilities transfer across different hardware.
It raised £585,000 in pre-seed funding in July 2026, backed by Haatch through its SEIS fund, the D2N2 angel fund and the British Business Bank Syndicate Fund, with teams across Sheffield, Nottinghamshire and London. Founders raising at this stage will find the structure familiar from the SEIS and EIS schemes most early UK rounds are built on.
Laboratory and surgical robotics
CMR Surgical is the heavyweight. Founded in Cambridge in 2014 and now led by Massimiliano Colella, it makes Versius, a modular robot-assisted keyhole surgery system whose independent arms can be wheeled between operating theatres.
In December 2025 it won FDA clearance for Versius Plus. In October 2026 Stryker put in $400m of preferred equity, taking an exclusive option to buy the company outright and becoming exclusive US sales agent while CMR keeps development and non-US commercialisation. It is the clearest exit path any UK robotics company currently has.
Automata was founded in 2015 by Mostafa ElSayed and Suryansh Chandra, both out of Zaha Hadid Architects' research lab, which is not the usual origin story for a lab automation business. Its LINQ platform combines modular benches, orchestration software and data infrastructure to make wet labs programmable.
Its $45m Series C closed in January 2026, led by Dimension, with Danaher making a separate strategic investment and putting a director on the board.
Chemify is the most ambitious science play on this list. Spun out of the University of Glasgow in 2022 by Professor Lee Cronin, it runs "chemputation", where an AI design engine drives industrial-scale robotic synthesis of molecules.
Its Chemifarm facility opened in Maryhill in June 2025. A $50m-plus Series B followed in October 2025, co-led by Wing Venture Capital and Insight Partners, and in September 2026 it secured £22m in grants, £16m from Scottish Enterprise and £6m from central government, towards a second-generation facility. Total funding is reported at over £110m.
Arctoris runs Ulysses, a robotic wet lab that executes biology experiments end to end, with clients ordering and tracking work through a web portal. Founded at Oxford in 2016 by Martin-Immanuel Bittner and Tom Fleming, who is now CEO, it operates from Abingdon rather than Oxford city despite how it is usually described.
Beauhurst puts total funding at £14.0m across four rounds plus £855k in grants. Its last publicly confirmed round was a £3.2m seed in 2019, so the company is overdue a funding update.
Farming and food
Agricultural robotics is where UK labour shortages bite hardest, and the sector shows it.
Dogtooth Technologies builds robots that move through polytunnels, identify ripe strawberries and raspberries by computer vision and pick them without bruising. Incorporated in 2014 and based at Melbourn near Royston, it is led by co-founder Dr Duncan Robertson.
It raised over £14m in July 2026, combining equity from 24Haymarket, EMV Capital and ACF Investors with Innovate UK grants and a Kineo Finance leasing facility. In a Dyson Farming trial its fifth-generation robot went from one or two berries a minute to more than seven. No source names the round type or a lead investor, so be wary of anyone who does.
Fieldwork Robotics is a University of Plymouth spin-out, now operating from Cambridge Innovation Park under CEO David Fulton, building soft robotic arms and grippers for raspberry harvesting. The technology has also been pointed at cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage.
It announced a £2.5m Seed+ round in April 2026 with SEED Innovations participating, following a £2.2m round led by Elbow Beach Capital reported in May. Those figures overlap across reports and should not be added together.
Buildings, infrastructure and the built environment
AUAR, short for Automated Architecture, was founded in 2019 by Mollie Claypool and Gilles Retsin. It rents out compact robotic micro-factories that cut and assemble the full timber structure of a house locally, in about 12 hours, linked to AI-assisted design software called MasterBuilder. It raised £5.1m in June 2025 in a round led by Planet A.
Q-Bot sends a remotely operated robot into the void beneath suspended timber floors to spray insulation from underneath, so no floorboards come up. Founded in 2012 by Mathew Holloway, Tom Lipinski and Professor Peter Childs, it is a long-running retrofit business rather than a new one.
Its most recent raise was a first closing announced by EMV Capital in June 2025, about £350,000 of new equity against a £1m target plus the conversion of around £865,000 of convertible loans. Press consistently calls it London-based while the register gives a Cheltenham office.
HausBots builds wall-climbing crawler robots that carry swappable inspection payloads up storage tanks, silos, bridges, dams and turbine blades, removing the need for scaffolding or cherry pickers. Its AEROGRIP adhesion system generates over 45kg of downforce.
Co-founded in Birmingham in 2018 by Jack Cornes, it raised a £1.5m seed led by Pi Labs and Plug and Play Ventures in September 2022 and has announced no funding since. The business has shifted from painting towards non-destructive testing.
Robotiz3d came out of the University of Liverpool in 2020, founded by Lisa Layzell, Dr Paolo Paoletti and Dr Sebastiano Fichera. Its ARRES EYE system mounts on a vehicle roof rack, scans road surfaces at up to 100km/h and classifies defects in the cloud; ARRES PREVENT, an autonomous crack-sealing vehicle, is still a prototype.
It took about £200,000 in Praetura Ventures' first PraeSeed cohort in December 2024. Anyone writing about it should check which legal entity is current: the original Robotiz3d Limited was renamed and now faces strike-off, with operations in a 2024-incorporated company.
Human-machine interfaces
Open Bionics makes 3D-printed, clinically approved multi-grip bionic hands for people with below-elbow limb difference. Joel Gibbard and Samantha Payne founded it in Bristol in 2014, out of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory incubator, and it has passed 1,000 users.
Its Hero PRO and Hero RGD launched in April 2025 after $2.5m and four years of development, using wireless EMG electrodes to read muscle signals. Its last confirmable priced round is the $5.9m Series A from January 2019, led by the Foresight Williams Technology EIS Fund, although a 2024 Crowdcube raise also exists.
Touchlab gives robots a sense of touch. Founded in Edinburgh in 2018 by Dr Zaki Hussein and now based inside the National Robotarium, it makes a thin retrofittable electronic skin that senses pressure, location and direction well enough for a robot to roll a pen or detect and correct for slip.
It raised a $4.8m seed led by Octopus Ventures in 2022, and in November 2025 won a £1m contract under ARIA's Robot Dexterity programme for a project called GRIT.
The main robotics hubs in the UK
Four places do most of the heavy lifting, and each works differently.
Bristol Robotics Laboratory is the largest academic robotics facility in the country, a joint venture between the University of Bristol and UWE Bristol spanning over 4,600 square metres with more than 450 researchers and practitioners. Its hardware incubator is where Open Bionics started. Be careful quoting its impact numbers, as the published figures on its own site date from 2019.
The National Robotarium in Edinburgh is the newest, a £22.4m purpose-built facility opened in September 2022 and funded through the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal. Its 2025 annual review reports 14 robotics companies housed on site, more than 20 using its incubation support and about 140 people working there daily. Touchlab is a resident.
Cambridge has the capital but no single building you can point at. Its pull comes from the university, from investors like Cambridge Innovation Capital with over £600m under management, and from a small number of companies that raised very large rounds. The university also has three of the 26 teams funded by ARIA's Robot Dexterity programme, more than any other institution.
Oxford works through spinouts. The Oxford Robotics Institute became an independent institute in 2016 and now runs to around 100 people, and Oxa, Arctoris and Dexory all trace back to the Oxfordshire ecosystem. Nearby, UKAEA's RACE facility at Culham does nuclear and extreme-environment robotics.
Beyond the big four: Lincoln is the centre of UK agri-robotics through the Lincoln Institute for Agri-Food Technology at Riseholme; Sheffield's AMRC anchors advanced manufacturing; the Manufacturing Technology Centre at Ansty Park near Coventry runs its own automation accelerator; and RAICo in Whitehaven handles nuclear decommissioning robotics with UKAEA, Sellafield and the University of Manchester.
What the government is actually doing about robotics
There is no national robotics strategy. That is the first thing to understand, and it is a live complaint from within the sector.
What exists instead is Smart Machines 2035, published by DSIT in February 2025 as an independent report from the Robotics Growth Partnership, co-chaired by former Ocado CTO Paul Clarke and Edinburgh Centre for Robotics founder Professor David Lane. It is a ten-year roadmap that government welcomed rather than adopted.
It is also the source of the figure now quoted in every announcement: robotics and autonomous systems could take UK gross value added from £6.4bn to around £150bn by 2035 if adoption is maximised.
The AI Opportunities Action Plan of January 2025 mentions robotics four times and commits nothing specific to it. The government's formal response to that plan does not mention robotics at all.
The money that does exist
Robotics Adoption Hubs. On 9 October 2026 the government announced £40m for eight regional Robotics Adoption Hubs, delivered through Innovate UK. They are advisory and demonstration centres, not factories. The eight are:
- SHARP, the National Surgical Robotic Adoption Hub, for safe uptake of surgical robotics
- HARVEST in Lincoln, for arable farming, fruit, vegetables and food manufacturing, a £7.1m project with £4.8m going to the University of Lincoln
- Greater South West Robotics Adoption Hub, £9.8m, led by Bristol Robotics Laboratory with the National Composites Centre, covering maritime, energy and food packaging, fully operational by January 2027
- Yorkshire Robotics Adoption Hub, £3.67m, led by the University of Bradford with Huddersfield, targeting 300-plus manufacturers
- National Waste and Recycling Robotics Adoption Hub (NORAH), £3.6m, led by Kingston University with the University of Kent
- Milton Keynes Robotics Adoption Hub, for service robots, drones and self-driving vehicles in public spaces
- South Wales Robotics Adoption Hub, led by University of Wales Trinity Saint David in Swansea
- Hwb Llwybr Roboteg Cymru, supporting Welsh manufacturers
Alongside those sits £1.7m for AURA, a national convening body run by The Welding Institute with Anglia Ruskin University, and £2.5m across 12 robotics training and apprenticeship projects. Watch for the acronym clash: the MTC runs a separate accelerator also called AURA.
Advanced Manufacturing Sector Plan. Part of the Modern Industrial Strategy, it carries up to £4.3bn for advanced manufacturing including up to £2.8bn of R&D over five years, plus £29m a year for Made Smarter Innovation to 2030 and up to £99m for Made Smarter Adoption from 2026.
ARIA Robot Dexterity. The Advanced Research and Invention Agency has expanded this programme to £88.5m across 26 funded teams, with an open call on benchmarks and standards closing on 1 December 2026. Funded participants include Shadow Robot, Ocado Group, Touchlab and Createc alongside Cambridge, Imperial, Bristol and the MTC.
For founders, the practical point is that most of this is grant and adoption money rather than equity, and it sits alongside the wider startup grant schemes open in the UK.
The ones that did not make it
Any honest list of UK robotics companies has to include the ones that stopped, because the failure rate in capital-intensive hardware is the real story behind the funding totals.
Rovco and Vaarst, the Bristol subsea robotics businesses founded by Brian Allen, merged into Beam in 2024 and ceased operations in May 2025, making more than 100 staff redundant. Rovco Limited is in liquidation and Vaarst Limited was dissolved in May 2026. Rosenxt bought selected assets and staff in July 2025.
Wootzano, the County Durham company behind the Avarai robotic produce-packing system and its electronic skin, entered liquidation in November 2025 after enforcement by a lender. Edinburgh's Court of Session granted a sist in May 2026 letting it trade again under court-appointed interim managers, with founder Dr Atif Syed stepping down as a director.
Small Robot Company, the arable field robotics business, ceased trading with Kroll appointed as liquidators.
None of those companies lacked good engineering. They ran out of runway before the unit economics worked, which is the defining risk of the category and the reason investors now write fewer, larger cheques into fewer companies.
What this actually means if you are building here
Three things stand out from the 2026 data, and none of them is the headline number.
The first is that robotics funding in the UK has become a barbell. A handful of companies raise nine-figure rounds while the long tail raises grants and pre-seed cheques under £1m, with very little in between. Of 357 tracked companies, 27 have reached Series A or beyond.
The second is that the exits are strategic, not financial. Stryker's option over CMR Surgical, Bosch manufacturing for Humanoid, Rockwell investing in Slamcore, Danaher in Automata: industrial corporates are the buyers of UK robotics, and building towards one of them is a more realistic plan than building towards an IPO. The pattern echoes what shows up across the largest UK startup funding rounds this year.
The third is that the UK's adoption problem is also its market. A country with 101 robots per 10,000 workers and falling installations is a weak domestic customer base, which is why so many of these companies sell abroad early. The £40m of adoption hubs is an attempt to fix the demand side rather than the supply side, and that is the right diagnosis even if the sum is small against a £150bn claim.
If you are spinning a robotics company out of a university lab, the equity terms matter as much as the technology, and the rules changed in 2023. Our guide to UK university spin-out deals covers what institutions now take. If you are raising, it is worth knowing which UK investors are most active right now before you build a target list.
Building something in UK robotics, or know a company that belongs on this list? Tell Bizztor about it.
