Extend Robotics raises £2.6 million to let manufacturers hire robots by the outcome, not buy them by the unit
Round led by Skyworks Venture Capital Fund backs the company’s Result-as-a-Service model, already running on a live production line
LONDON, 28th September 2026 Extend Robotics, the UK embodied-AI company behind an immersive teleoperation platform for industrial robots, has closed a £2.6 million Pre-A funding round led by Skyworks Venture Capital Fund, with participation from Neo Venture (Europe) and Zip Capital. The funding will scale its Result-as-a-Service offering across UK and European industry and build out its remote operator network.
European manufacturing faces a widening labour shortage, but much of the work left unfilled is exactly what conventional automation cannot absorb: small-batch, high-mix, rework and maintenance tasks, alongside hazardous operations in nuclear, aerospace and high-voltage environments. Extend Robotics addresses this with human-robot collaboration rather than full autonomy. Its AMAS platform lets an operator without a robotics background control a robot arm or humanoid remotely through an immersive 3D interface, with AI assistance handling the routine portions of the task.
Under Result-as-a-Service, customers pay for completed work rather than purchasing equipment — taking on robotic capacity much as they take on labour, priced against output and scaled with demand. That moves cycle-time and success-rate risk onto Extend Robotics, and turns a first deployment from a capital decision into an operating one.
“Every manufacturer we talk to has jobs they cannot fill and a finance director who will not sign off on a robot that might not work,” said Chang Liu, Founder and CEO of Extend Robotics. “So stop selling them robots. Sell them the work getting done, price it against the output, and carry the risk ourselves.”
The model is already running in production. At Adrian Scripps, one of the UK’s largest apple growers, an Extend Robotics humanoid carries out quality control on a working packing line — not a staged demonstration, but the actual job, on live produce. The deployment was streamed live from the line at the Google DeepMind Robotics Accelerator Demo Day in September, where Extend Robotics was one of twelve companies selected for the three-month programme.
Operational data is collected continuously, so the system becomes more autonomous the longer it runs while the customer pays for output throughout.
Because operators work through a remote interface rather than on the factory floor, the model also changes who can do industrial work. Extend Robotics is building towards a distributed operator network in which a task at a plant in the North West can be performed by someone elsewhere in the UK or Europe, without relocation and without entering a paint booth, a glovebox or a live high-voltage cell — opening these roles to a national or European labour pool rather than whoever lives within driving distance of the site.
At Leyland Trucks, the company trained a robot to fit high-voltage Master Service Disconnect units, previously a high-risk live-electrical operation, with a second deployment handling spray painting of custom components. Extend Robotics is hardware-neutral by design and was in January named an official integrator for Unitree Robotics. NVIDIA selected the company as one of five for its Robotics Startup Showcase at GTC 2026.
Extend Robotics now serves 35 subscription customers across four sales regions, spanning automotive, aerospace, nuclear, robotics and agriculture, with revenue doubling year on year for three consecutive years. Founded in 2021 by Chang Liu, a former Imperial College London postdoctoral researcher in aerial robotics, the company is based in Reading, UK.
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