Icebreaker.vc participates in Cota Robotics' €1.92M pre-seed round
Cota Robotics, a robotics company building AI-powered robots for physical retail, has raised €1.92 million in a pre-seed funding round led by byFounders, with participation from EstVCA member Icebreaker.vc, Rethink Ventures, and strategic angel investors, including Fredrik Hjelm, Mattias Miksche, and Kamyar Espahbodi.
Founded by second-time founders and aerospace and robotics engineers Teo Rizvanovic and Kildo Alias, Cota is developing a robotic workforce for modern retail, with robots taking on repetitive in-store tasks such as shelf replenishment, inbound handling, and picking.
Rather than selling robots as standalone equipment, Cota operates them as a service. Its robots are designed to operate within existing stores and workflows without costly retrofits, while Cota manages deployment and operations, providing retailers with additional capacity on an ongoing basis.
The company is initially focused on overnight retail operations, where repetitive work and labour shortages create a strong case for automation. Cota has already started paid pilots with its first retail customers and is operating robots at two sites.
The funding will support the company's continued deployment of robotic fleets and development of the operational infrastructure needed to bring Physical AI into everyday commercial environments.
“Robotics is coming, but a very large part of the work will be to make them do something useful. If you just get it off the shelf, it will not really do anything. Companies will need pipelines, skills, monitoring, testing, etc. Cota Robotics is bringing robots to retail, and they are already running two sites with robots,” said Riku Seppälä, General Partner at Icebreaker.vc.
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