In 2020, Roman Hölzl, Paul Maroldt and Constantin Dresel were research associates at the Chair of Robotics and AI at TUM, the Technical University of Munich. Hölzl, a former competitive skier, brought the commercial drive, while Maroldt and Dresel brought deep technical expertise.
They kept hitting the same wall. Industrial robots were brilliant for the carmakers of the world, but they were expensive, rigid and needed costly integration projects, which put them out of reach for the mid-sized manufacturers that make up the backbone of German industry. Those were the companies hurting most, with 2 million vacant labour positions across Europe and wages rising 6.6% a year.
Their research pointed to a fix. What if a robot was built like Lego? Standard modules that snap together into whatever arm a job needs, with software that knows which configuration it's in and what it's being used for. No programmers. No months-long projects. When the job changes, you rebuild the robot rather than scrap it.
Then the kicker: don't sell it. Rent it.
This was the beginning of RobCo.
The Execution:
The lesson? The robot giants spent decades selling expensive machines to the factories that could afford them. RobCo went after the ones that couldn't and stripped out every reason to say no: no upfront cost, no programmers, no months-long integration, about $1,000 a month. It had robots on real factory floors on a couple of million dollars before Sequoia ever showed up. The incumbents decided the Mittelstand was too small. It just made RobCo a unicorn.