Allonic is rebuilding robotics from the inside out

"Allonic's $7.2m pre-seed matters because it breaks a quiet rule in Europe: that truly hard hardware problems are supposed to wait until later rounds, or later continents. This is early money going into the physical layer of robotics, not the AI wrapper around it, and it's happening in Budapest, not Silicon Valley or Munich. This may also send a signal that European investors are starting to back ambition at the source, where things are messy, slow, and expensive to build."

"Today's robots are typically assembled from scores of individual mechanical parts, bearings, screws, cables, and rigid linkages, a process that is slow, expensive, and hard to scale. Instead, Allonic uses what it calls a 3D Tissue Braiding process, which automatically weaves together fibres, elastics, and embedded wiring over an endoskeleton in a single continuous operation. Allonic has already completed an initial pilot in electronics manufacturing, and says it is in talks with companies across industrial automation and humanoid robotics."

Allonic raised $7.2 million in a pre-seed round led by Visionaries Club with participation from Day One Capital, Prototype, SDAC Ventures, TinyVC, and more than a dozen angels including participants from OpenAI and Hugging Face. Investors call the round the largest pre-seed in Hungarian startup history. The funding targets hardware development for robotics rather than AI wrappers and is based in Budapest. The raise signals growing investor willingness in Europe to fund early-stage, hard physical-layer problems and recognizes Central and Eastern Europe as a source of original industrial ideas. Allonic's 3D Tissue Braiding weaves fibres, elastics, and wiring over an endoskeleton in one automated process. The company completed a pilot in electronics manufacturing and is in talks with industrial automation and humanoid robotics firms. The new capital will expand engineering and commercial teams and accelerate product development.

Read at TNW | Robots