YK-Robotics raises €1 million seed round co-led by Draper B1 and First Drop

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YK-Robotics has closed a €1 million seed round co-led by Draper B1 and First Drop. BStartup (Banco Sabadell), Coben Ventures, Elephant Capital and PnP USA (Plug and Play) also took part. The company was founded in Florence in 2020 by Joan Ortega Alcaide, its CEO, and Marco Guadagni, its CTO, who kept running into the same puzzle: automating a process an operator can explain in five minutes took several robotics experts months. The group's parent is the Spanish YK Robotics, S.L., which owns all of the Italian YK-Robotics Srl.

Its answer is YK-Platform, software that serves as the brain of a robotic cell and lets users request a task, an operator screen or a format change in natural language, which the system translates into the industrial protocols and programming languages. It works with robots from KUKA, FANUC, ABB, Universal Robots, Comau, Kawasaki and Estun, including installed ones that have sat idle since the product they handled changed. The company sells turnkey cells, also as robotics-as-a-service, to manufacturers, integrators and machine builders, and says its projects have deployed cells in up to 80% less time while producing around 20% more.

The money will fund the launch of its cells in Spain, starting in Catalonia, the Valencian Community, Aragón and the Basque Country, a wider partner network, a platform usable entirely in natural language, and hiring, mainly in Barcelona. The robots get the vocabulary; the humans keep the veto. "The AI proposes, the user decides," says Guadagni.