Cota Robotics

Retail and service work across Europe is currently in a labour. The industry is one of the region's largest employers, at more than 11% of business-sector jobs in 2023, but employment in the sector has barely grown since 2015 even as most other sectors kept adding jobs, and industry groups increasingly call hiring and skills a real problem. Two things have changed at the same time to make robots a serious option for the first time. (1) They have gotten much cheaper to build. (2) AI models have gotten good enough to let a machine move and work in spaces built for people rather than for robots. Most of this is still in very early stages, especially for robots deployed inside retail operations but will enable large-scale deployments in the future.

The retail automation market, counting robots of all kinds, is worth roughly $58 billion in 2026, up from $19 billion in 2015. The humanoid robot market specifically was worth about $4.5 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow at roughly 50% a year through 2034.

Cota Robotics is a pre-seed stage robotics as a service startup from Stockholm founded in 2025. They are deploying AI-powered humanoids into retail and warehouse operations. The robots are placed into a customer's existing space and workflow with no infrastructure change. Do they build their own robots or run on someone else's hardware? Their rivals have raised hundreds of millions, so an early route could be to build the software and operations on top of existing hardware.

The founding team is strong, co-founded by two serial entrepreneurs, Teo Rizvanovic and Kildo Alias who co-founded the drone delivery startup aerit together before starting Cota. Teo also brings experience from autonomous vehicles at Wolt. The founders both went to KTH where Teo studied aerospace engineering and Kildo studied robotics.

One of the bigger risks we see is how hard the retail environment is when it comes to deploying robots. A retail floor is a meaningfully harder safety problem than a warehouse. Warehouses have controlled access, trained staff, and consistent layouts, which is why AI-powered robots already have deployed successfully there. On the contrary, a store has unpredictable human traffic, members of the public who haven't been “briefed” on anything, and floorplans that change from one site to the next. Most well-funded humanoid peers are deploying in industrial settings first and treating public-facing spaces as a later problem.