Factories are using more automation than ever. Robots now assemble products, move heavy items, and handle complex tasks with impressive accuracy. But there’s still one big challenge: getting different robots to work together.

Stefan Zetzsch, co-founder and CEO of Evasive Robotics, knows this challenge firsthand. He spent years managing production teams and bringing automation into factories. Installing a robot is just the start—making it fit into an existing production setup is a whole different challenge.

His company is building software that helps robots from different manufacturers work together in the same space, without needing a lot of reprogramming. After raising over €2.1 million in a pre-seed round, Evasive Robotics is speeding up development, growing its team, and testing its technology in real factories.

But Stefan wants to do more than just connect a few machines. He imagines a future where specialized robots work together smoothly. We talked with Stefan about his path from working on the factory floor to starting a robotics company, the ups and downs of physical AI, and why the next five years could change industrial automation. 

About Evasive Robotics

Evasive Robotics, founded in October 2024, is a German software company working on an orchestration layer for industrial robots. Their technology lets different types and brands of robots move together in real time and share the same workspace.

The company recently raised over €2.1 million in a pre-seed funding round supported by Nucleus Capital, xista science ventures, Vanagon, Robin Capital, and several business angels. This funding will help develop their technology, support customer projects, and grow the team.

From the factory floor to the founder's chair

Stefan’s career didn’t start in a research lab or university robotics department like many deep tech founders. He began on the factory floor.

As a mechanical engineer, he worked in several roles at a steel mill, learning how to balance production, sales, quality, logistics, managing a team of 300 people, analyzing processes, introducing improvements, and implementing automation solutions.

Later, as general manager of a mid-sized metalworking company, he kept buying new machines, restructuring processes, and making production more efficient.

These experiences taught him something you can’t get from a textbook: what really happens when technology meets the real world of industry.

"I know what it means actually to get an automation solution into production," he explains. "Not only to buy it, but to ramp it up and really use it." He also learned that even the best technology can fail if the people who use it aren’t involved.

"If you don’t have a champion on the shop floor, the solution is dead before you even bring it in."

For Stefan, understanding customers means knowing everything around the technology, from materials and data to the people who make it all work.

"I'm not saying I know all the pitfalls, but at least I know where to look for them."

Making robots work together

Industrial robots are getting more advanced. But most automation still focuses on single machines, specific manufacturers, or certain applications. This becomes a problem when factories want different systems to work together.

Evasive Robotics is creating software to close that gap.

"We started with a motion planner," Stefan explains. "A technology that allows us to let many robots work together in the same working space, with no need to program."

The company focuses on software and doesn’t depend on any specific hardware. Their technology is made to work with different manufacturers, robot types, and setups so that manufacturers can rely on one robotics ecosystem. Evasive Robotics wants to make it possible to combine the best specialized solutions.

There are huge possibilities for this technology, from manufacturing and logistics to agriculture and hospitality. But having technology that could work in so many places brought an unexpected challenge. The team just needed to choose where to begin.

"Every brand is focusing on its own solution, the benefit comes when you have many specialized solutions working hand in hand."

Solving the problems factories face today

For a new startup, staying focused is key. Evasive Robotics decided to focus initially on mobile robotics, particularly intralogistics: moving materials and goods within industrial facilities.

Stefan sees a big opportunity here. Manufacturers already have highly specialized machines that assemble, process, and manufacture products. But moving materials between those machines, loading equipment, and unloading finished components still requires a lot of human input.

"The problem is loading these machines, unloading them, and getting material from A to B. This is where coordinated robots can really help.”

By enabling different machines to work together, Evasive Robotics wants to automate the tasks around production, so manufacturers can focus on what they do best. While the company is starting with intralogistics, the underlying technology has huge potential beyond this.

The long-term goal is to build software that can coordinate almost any mix of specialized robots.

"The machines can already do great things."

Starting from scratch

Stefan had thought about starting his own business for a while before Evasive Robotics became real. As an engineer with broad industrial experience, he knew he needed a technical co-founder with deep robotics expertise.

At first, he looked for a robotics specialist. Then he realized maybe a robotics expert was searching for someone with his business and operations experience.

He met Frank Peters, now the CTO of Evasive Robotics, through a local co-founder network. "Depending on the perspective, who found whom?" Stefan jokes.

The founding team consists of four people: David Kuß (Co-CTO) and Tom Sauer (COO) Stefan and Frank.

They went all in on the venture in 2023, set up the company in October 2024, and started out by funding development with research grants.

Today, the team has 20 people, including employees and university researchers working on the project. Leading people wasn't new to Stefan; he had managed teams since graduating. What surprised him was how different building a company from scratch would be.

In an established business, there are already processes in place. Some work well; others need fixing. A manager can spot problems and focus on solving them. 

"When you found a company, there's nothing to optimize," he says. "You're starting on a green field."

Instead of improving what’s already there, founders have to build everything from scratch: internal processes, customer relationships, and business development all at once.

"I didn’t expect the difference to be this big, to be honest."

Finding investors who understand the vision

Explaining Evasive Robotics to investors was another challenge.

As first-time founders building software that could be used in many industries, the team had to turn a broad technical vision into a clear business case.

"The downside of our technology is that it's pretty hard to explain," Stefan admits. While the founders saw huge potential, winning over investors meant showing them where the company could deliver value right away.

"The big vision is to cover it all," he explains. "We're always going back and forth between the big vision, where you have world dominance, and then narrowing it down and saying, okay, now we're going to do intralogistics."

Their recently announced funding round marks an important milestone. With more than €2.1 million secured, Evasive Robotics can now focus on advancing its technology, working with customers and building the team.

Importantly, it also gives the company more freedom to pick projects that fit their strategy, which might mean telling potential customers that Evasive Robotics isn't the right solution for them yet.

For Stefan, knowing when to say no is now just as important as knowing when to say yes.

"We need to choose the right projects, not those projects which will give us the most money, but those that actually fit best with our roadmap."

Beyond the humanoid hype

Physical AI is getting a lot of attention and investment. But Stefan thinks the buzz around humanoid robots sometimes distracts manufacturers from more practical opportunities.

He remembers visiting companies that still relied heavily on paperwork, only to be asked if Evasive Robotics had a humanoid robot. He responded by asking whether they should digitize their operations before considering advanced robotics.

For Stefan, AI brings both opportunities and challenges. AI is speeding up innovation and encouraging manufacturers to invest in automation. But it’s also creating unrealistic expectations about what robots can do right now.

"I think the main competition for us is actually AI," he says.

The fast pace of robotics development makes it hard for investors and production managers to know which solutions will work out.

At the same time, other markets are moving fast. Stefan describes conversations with a potential Chinese customer who was willing to invest in Evasive Robotics' technology even when the solution wasn’t 100% finished.

Stefan thinks this willingness to experiment is one reason Chinese companies are moving ahead so quickly in robotics and automotive tech. This is putting pressure on European manufacturers who need to act quickly to keep up.

"I told them our solution isn't ready yet. We still have development to do, but the customer replied, "I don't care. I see the potential. Let's do it."

The next five years of robotics

Even with all the excitement about humanoid robots, Stefan believes the biggest advances in the near future will come from automating everyday tasks. Using materials, loading machines, and coordinating production processes might not generate spectacular demonstrations, but these applications have enormous commercial potential.

"We still have so many standard applications to be covered," he explains.

The next step is to make these solutions easy to repeat and scale up.

"In the next five years, I think we’ll see great solutions that we can actually scale. Standardized applications with standardized robotics." Only then does Stefan expect the industry to move into complex, specialized applications.

Evasive Robotics has a clear five-year goal: to offer software that helps manufacturers coordinate all kinds of robots, from humanoids and quadrupeds to mobile platforms and stationary robotic cells.

The main goal is to take away the complexity of coordinating machines, so manufacturers can focus on their products and what they do best.

"We will be able to provide software for our customers that lets them work together with many specialized robots."

Quickfire round

Which founder or startup do you admire?

"Roman Hölzl from Robco. He and the team did a really good job. They started with reconfigurable robots, realized the approach wouldn't scale, and shifted to providing solutions. They've managed to scale something that wasn't scalable before."

What's one tool you can't live without?

"AI tools. We're currently trying Claude. We use AI more and more, not just for programming but also for writing emails and analyzing documents. There are basically two of us covering business development, Tom and me, and without these tools we couldn't manage the amount of work."

What's your recharge ritual?

"My family. Sometimes it's just one or two hours in the evening when I put my phone aside and spend time with my wife and kids. We also love being outdoors. Last weekend, we spent a whole day hiking through the autumnal forest."

What's one piece of advice that has stuck with you?

"Just do it. Don't always shoot for perfection. Some tasks require 120%, but not all. Sometimes 80% is enough. You have to be conscious of where you put your effort."

Building the future of industrial automation

For Stefan, the future of robotics isn't necessarily about replacing people with humanoid machines or creating robots that can do everything. It’s about helping existing technologies work better together.

Factories already have amazing capabilities. But many of these are isolated, limited by systems that don’t work together, complicated integrations, and the effort it takes to coordinate machines.

Evasive Robotics wants to fix that. With its recent funding, the company can now move from developing technology to wider use in industry, showing that different robots can reliably work together in real factories.

There’s still a lot to do. The team needs to keep improving its software, pick the right customer projects, and show that the technology can scale.

But Stefan’s years on the factory floor taught him that successful automation isn’t about how impressive a machine looks. It’s about whether it solves a real problem.

And if Evasive Robotics succeeds, future factories won’t need more robots, they’ll need robots that can work together. Check out their work on their website and watch this space.