Where NVIDIA Is Investing in Germany: Agile Robots, Avelios, Mirelo and Reflex Aerospace
NVIDIA plans to invest in four German companies: Agile Robots (industrial robots), Avelios Medical (AI-native hospital software), Mirelo (AI sound for video) and Reflex Aerospace (satellites). The amounts are undisclosed and the deals are announced as planned, not closed. They sit inside NVIDIA's nearly $10 billion commitment to Europe.
What Is This About?
On 19 October 2026, during his Germany visit and an on-stage conversation with Chancellor Friedrich Merz at the Invest in Germany Summit, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced "new planned investments in Agile Robots, Avelios Medical, Mirelo and Reflex Aerospace", according to NVIDIA's announcement. On the same day NVIDIA signed a joint declaration of intent with the federal government on physical AI, meaning AI that controls machines and robots.
The four names cover very different markets: factory robots, hospital records, generative audio and space hardware. That spread is the story. For founders, it shows which German AI categories NVIDIA wants a seat in. For investors, it adds a corporate co-investor to cap tables that already include Sequoia, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and SoftBank. For corporate decision makers, it marks where NVIDIA expects demand for its compute to come from next.
Startuprad.io tracks this field in its pillar on industrial and enterprise AI in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. This piece explains what each company does, what was announced, and what has not been said yet.
Executive Summary
NVIDIA named four German companies for planned minority investments of undisclosed size. Agile Robots and Mirelo already worked with NVIDIA technology before the announcement; Reflex Aerospace says the money will go into Bavarian production and on-board data processing. All four sit where AI meets specialist expertise, a regulated workflow or physical hardware. That pattern is our reading, not NVIDIA's stated rationale, and the deals still need to close.
Key Takeaways
Four planned stakes, zero disclosed terms. No amount, ownership share or valuation has been published for any of the four investments.
Two of the four were already inside NVIDIA's orbit. Agile Robots trains on NVIDIA infrastructure, and Mirelo says it already used NVIDIA compute and the Inception startup program.
The $10 billion figure is not the size of these deals. It is NVIDIA's broader European commitment to companies, universities and research institutions.
Hospital software is the outlier worth watching. Avelios is the only one of the four without a hardware or media product, and its value to an AI company is structured clinical data and workflows.
Watch for closings, not headlines. The proof comes with completed investments, product integrations and named customer deployments.
FAQ: The Short Answers
Which German companies is NVIDIA investing in?
NVIDIA announced planned investments in Agile Robots, Avelios Medical, Mirelo and Reflex Aerospace on 19 October 2026. Earlier NVIDIA stakes in Germany, according to Trending Topics and Tech.eu, include n8n, Neura Robotics and Black Forest Labs.
How much is NVIDIA investing in Agile Robots, Avelios, Mirelo and Reflex Aerospace?
No amounts have been disclosed. Reflex Aerospace describes its deal as a planned minority stake. The nearly $10 billion figure in NVIDIA's announcement covers its entire European commitment, not these four deals.
What does Reflex Aerospace do?
Reflex Aerospace designs and builds satellites for low Earth orbit and says it can deliver them in about 12 months. The company is headquartered in Berlin, builds its satellites in a Munich factory, and launched its first satellite, SIGI, in January 2025.
Who owns Avelios Medical?
Avelios Medical is a privately held Munich company founded in 2020 by Christian Albrecht, Nicolas Jakob and Dr. Sebastian Krammer. Its disclosed investors include Sequoia Capital, Revent, HTGF, SAP and Fresenius, with NVIDIA now announced as a planned investor.
Is this circular financing?
Critics, including warnings cited from the International Monetary Fund, argue that chipmakers investing in AI companies that then buy their chips blurs investment and revenue, as Trending Topics reports. Huang rejects this. For these four companies, no compute purchase commitments tied to the investments have been disclosed.
The Four Companies and Why Each Matters
Agile Robots: robots that already run on NVIDIA
What it does. Agile Robots was founded in Munich in 2018 by Zhaopeng Chen and Peter Meusel, both from the robotics institute of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). It builds force-sensitive robot arms, complete automation systems and, since November 2025, the Agile ONE humanoid for industrial work. Its $220 million Series C in 2021, led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, made it a unicorn. TechCrunch puts its total venture funding at more than $270 million. We covered the company's origins in our Agile Robots founder profile.
What was announced. A planned NVIDIA investment, terms undisclosed.
Why it matters. This is the deepest existing relationship of the four. In June 2025 NVIDIA said Agile Robots was post-training its GR00T N1 robot model in Isaac Lab for dual-arm manipulators running on NVIDIA Jetson hardware. Agile Robots is also an anchor customer of the Deutsche Telekom and NVIDIA Industrial AI Cloud in Munich, where it trains its foundation model. In March 2026 it added a research partnership with Google DeepMind. Capital from NVIDIA would add a shareholder whose chips, simulation software and robot models already sit inside the product. What it could add is faster access to new robotics models and joint go-to-market with industrial customers. Neither has been announced.
Avelios Medical: the hospital system as an AI data layer
What it does. Avelios Medical, founded in Munich in 2020, builds a modular, cloud-based hospital information system covering clinical documentation, nursing, medication, billing and an AI scribe. It raised a €30 million Series A led by Sequoia Capital in February 2025, followed by undisclosed investments from SAP in February 2026 and Fresenius in May 2026. Named customers include Sana Kliniken, LMU Klinikum and Hannover Medical School. In August 2026 Klinikum Stuttgart selected Avelios after an EU-wide tender to replace its SAP IS-H system.
What was announced. A planned NVIDIA investment, terms undisclosed. We found no statement from Avelios on the deal.
Why it matters. Clinical AI is only as good as the data it can reach, and in hospitals that data lives in the core record system. Avelios stores it in a structured, semantically annotated model rather than free text. Two forces open the German market: SAP is ending support for its IS-H hospital software in 2030, according to Munich Startup, and the federal Hospital Future Act (KHZG) made €4.3 billion available for hospital digitalisation. Whoever replaces the old systems controls the data layer that AI tools need. That makes core hospital software relevant to an AI company in a way it was not five years ago.
Mirelo: specialist audio models for video
What it does. Mirelo, founded in 2023 by CJ Simon-Gabriel and Florian Wenzel, runs its research lab in Berlin and trains its own models that add synchronised sound effects to video. Its main model, Mirelo SFX, reached version 2.0 on 14 October 2026 and is sold through Mirelo Studio, an API, editing plugins and model platforms such as fal.ai and Replicate. In December 2025 it raised a $41 million seed round co-led by Index Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.
What was announced. A planned NVIDIA investment. Mirelo wrote that it had already used NVIDIA compute, the Inception program and joint research exchanges.
Why it matters. Large video models from Google and others now generate audio for the clips they create. Mirelo's bet is narrower: sound for any video, from any generator or a real camera. NVIDIA describes Mirelo as generating "sound effects, speech and music"; its shipped products today centre on sound effects. For NVIDIA, a specialist model company is a compute customer and a proof point that domain-focused foundation models can be built in Europe on a seed budget.
Reflex Aerospace: satellites built in months, not years
What it does. Reflex Aerospace, founded in 2021, is headquartered in Berlin and builds its satellites in a Munich "MicroFactory". NVIDIA's blog calls it a Berlin scaleup, while Trending Topics calls it a Munich startup; both are right about different sites. It builds medium-sized satellite platforms for Earth observation, reconnaissance and communications and says it can deliver in about 12 months. Its first satellite, SIGI, flew on SpaceX's Transporter-12 mission in January 2025. In November 2025 it raised a €50 million Series A led by Human Element.
What was announced. Reflex calls it a planned minority stake with no financial details. "Wir freuen uns, NVIDIA im Kreis unserer Investoren zu begrüßen" ("We are pleased to welcome NVIDIA among our investors"), said CEO Walter Ballheimer, according to the company release as reported by defence-network.com. The money is earmarked for scaling production in Bavaria and for a platform architecture built around on-board data processing.
Why it matters. Satellites produce far more data than they can send to the ground. Processing it in orbit needs compute on board, which is NVIDIA's core product. European demand for sovereign reconnaissance is also rising: Reflex supplies satellite buses to Rheinmetall's space reconnaissance network and partners with Israel's Rafael. No source confirms NVIDIA hardware on Reflex satellites today, so treat that link as the logic of the deal, not a fact.
"AI can only augment your capability, it will not replace your capability." — Jensen Huang, quoted by NVIDIA in its Germany announcement
What Connects NVIDIA's German Investment Targets?
NVIDIA's stated rationale is broad. It frames the four deals as part of a commitment "to support companies, universities, research institutions and more across Europe", tied to the government's goal to bring industrial AI into widespread use. It does not give a reason for each company.
Our interpretation, clearly separate from that: all four sit where general-purpose AI meets something hard to copy.
Specialist expertise. Robot manipulation research from DLR, clinical documentation, audio modelling and satellite engineering each take years to build.
Operational workflows. A factory line, a hospital ward or a post-production pipeline is where AI has to work reliably, not only in a demo.
Physical infrastructure. Three of the four ship hardware or run inside it; the fourth controls the system of record in hospitals.
Each of these markets turns into demand for training and inference compute once AI is deployed at scale. The same pattern fits NVIDIA's earlier German bets, from the humanoid maker Neura Robotics to image-model lab Black Forest Labs and workflow platform n8n. It also explains why Germany's industrial base matters to NVIDIA more than its consumer market. The question of whether German startups can grow into companies of global size, which we track in The European Scale-Up Question, now has a new kind of shareholder in the mix. For context on corporate investors in the region, see our pillar on the investors behind tech in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Three of the four ship hardware or run inside it. The fourth owns the hospital's system of record.
What Has and Hasn't Been Announced?
Announced: planned investments in four named companies (NVIDIA, 19 October 2026); a joint declaration of intent with the federal government on physical AI; a Siemens partnership on AI-driven autonomous factories.
Not announced: investment amounts, ownership percentages, valuations, closing dates, board seats, and any compute purchase commitments. Only Reflex Aerospace and Mirelo have publicly commented.
Financial investment versus technology partnership. These are two different things. Agile Robots has had a technology relationship with NVIDIA since at least 2025, and Mirelo was an Inception member. A planned equity stake is a separate, capital-level commitment, and for Avelios and Reflex it is the first public NVIDIA link we could find.
The $10 billion context. NVIDIA's nearly $10 billion European commitment is much broader than these four companies. Trending Topics reports that a week earlier in Paris NVIDIA announced stakes in Doctolib, Pigment, Genesis AI and Entalpic under the same pledge. Germany's federal startup push, which we analysed in Germany's New Startup Strategy Is Really a Scaleup Strategy, now meets a foreign corporate investor that is choosing its own winners.
What to Watch Next
Completed investments. Look for closing announcements, round sizes and whether NVIDIA invests alone or alongside a priced round.
Product integrations. For Agile Robots, new NVIDIA robotics models in shipping products; for Reflex, on-board compute on future satellites; for Mirelo, model releases on NVIDIA platforms.
Hospital go-lives. Avelios has named customers and a Stuttgart contract, but no publicly confirmed hospital-wide go-live. The first one is the proof point.
Customer deployments. Agile ONE humanoids in paying factories, and Reflex satellites delivered to defence and Earth-observation customers.
Commercial progress. Revenue, headcount and follow-on rounds. Robotics peers such as RobCo, profiled in our RobCo Unicorn Atlas entry, and space companies such as Isar Aerospace, covered in Isar Aerospace Spectrum: Orbit Reached, Valuation Unproven, show how long the road from announcement to revenue can be.
There's more to this story.
For Entrepreneurs Vault members I go a level deeper: which of the four deals is most likely to close first, and what NVIDIA's cap-table position next to Sequoia, SAP and SoftBank means for founders raising in Germany.
Full analysis for members:
▶ YouTube: Join the Entrepreneurs Vault on YouTube
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About the Author
Joern "Joe" Menninger is the founder and host of Startuprad.io, the English-language startup and venture capital media platform covering Germany, Austria and Switzerland since 2014. With 1,700+ podcast episodes across the franchise, Startuprad.io connects founders, investors and corporate innovators across the region. Connect on LinkedIn
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