Bleu Robotics raises €5M pre-seed for factory humanoid setup

Paris-based Bleu Robotics has raised €5 million in a pre-seed round co-led by Contrarian Ventures and OVNI Capital, with Kvanted, WEPA Ventures, Motier Ventures and Meta board member Charlie Songhurst joining, Robotics & Automation News reported. The company says its software lets a humanoid learn a new task from "as few as ten operator demonstrations," with a goal of cutting full deployment on a production line to "one hour or shorter" at the 99%+ accuracy that factories demand.

The pitch leans on an unusual team. CEO Benoît Berkoukchi previously managed large teams on Renault assembly lines, while CTO Jean-Baptiste Mouret and Scientific Board Director Serena Ivaldi are INRIA research directors with 15+ years in AI and robotics. Bleu's bet is that end-to-end learning, the approach most frontier humanoid labs are chasing, will not translate to factories. "There isn't enough data on factory work, and there won't be internet-scale data, the kind LLMs were built on, for robots for a long time," Berkoukchi said. "Our methodology means we can do more with less."

The target buyer is high-mix, low-volume manufacturing, where traditional industrial robots struggle. Bleu says it is already working with two major industrial companies and building partnerships with robot distributors; the article does not name them.

Thomas Poitrineau of Contrarian Ventures framed the appeal in terms of distribution rather than lab benchmarks: "Their goal is far bigger than simply making the best model in a lab. It's an approach that can already scale, putting robots to work in factories within months rather than years." The round lands in a busy stretch for the sector, with robotics stories and funding stories each running into the hundreds across the last 90 days on our tracker.