Extend Robotics raises £2.6M to sell factory work by the outcome, not robots by the unit

Extend Robotics, an embodied-AI company based in Reading, has raised £2.6M in an early-stage round led by Skyworks Venture Capital Fund, with Neo Venture (Europe) and Zip Capital also taking part. The money goes towards scaling an unusual business model that sidesteps the thing most holding robots back in industry: the cost and risk of buying them.

Rather than sell machines, Extend sells outcomes. Its CEO Chang Liu puts it bluntly: “Stop selling them robots. Sell them the work getting done, price it against the output, and carry the risk ourselves.” Under this Result-as-a-Service model, a manufacturer pays for completed work — parts inspected, items handled — much as it would pay for labour, scaled against demand, with none of the upfront capital outlay or integration headache of owning a fleet.

A human in the loop, with AI doing the routine bits

What makes that economically possible is Extend’s AMAS platform. An operator — crucially, one who does not need to be a robotics engineer — controls a robot arm or a humanoid remotely through an immersive 3D interface, while AI handles the repetitive portions of the task. It is a deliberately pragmatic design: a bet that shared autonomy, a human steering with AI assistance, is a faster route to useful industrial robots than waiting for full autonomy to arrive.

That is a meaningful distinction, and worth being honest about. This is not a fleet of robots thinking for themselves. It is remote human operators, made far more productive by AI, with the degree of autonomy rising as the models improve. For jobs that are too fiddly or too varied for fixed automation but too dull or dangerous for on-site staff, it is a credible middle path.

Real deployments, not just a demo

Extend’s traction is more concrete than most at this stage. It reports 35 subscription customers across automotive, aerospace, nuclear, agriculture and robotics, and says revenue has doubled year-on-year for three consecutive years. One live production deployment has it performing quality control for the apple grower Adrian Scripps; it has partnered with the humanoid-maker Unitree Robotics; and it was featured in NVIDIA’s robotics startup showcase at GTC 2026.

Part of a widening UK robotics cluster

The round lands Extend among a growing set of British companies betting that the UK can be a serious player in physical AI, not just software. Wayve is the most prominent, putting self-driving cars on London’s streets, but the breadth is real — warehouse robotics from Dexory, factory automation from Automata, and humanoid work elsewhere in the directory. The common thread, and the hard part, is the same challenge DeepMind and others are chipping at with world models: giving machines enough understanding of the physical world to act in it reliably.

Extend’s answer is to not wait. By keeping a human in the loop and selling the output, it can earn revenue today while the autonomy catches up — and the £2.6M is aimed squarely at proving that model scales. Whether the unit economics of a human-operator network hold up as it grows is the question to watch; for now, it has paying customers in some of the most demanding corners of industry, which is more than many robotics stories can claim.

Extend Robotics’ full profile, and the rest of the UK’s robotics companies, are in our company directory.