Reimagine Robotics, founded by former Google DeepMind leaders in April 2025, has launched robots that workers can train directly through demonstration and correction rather than requiring specialist programmers.
The company is already deploying these robots in advanced manufacturing and electronics disassembly facilities, with early results showing that prototyping time for new robot behaviors dropped from about one day to around ten minutes.
The startup is now entering a new fundraising phase to expand deployments and scale its team.
What happened
Reimagine Robotics, founded by former Google DeepMind leaders including CEO Jonathan Scholz, emerged from stealth with robots that learn tasks directly from workers through demonstration and real-time correction—a process Scholz calls 'monkey-see, monkey-do.' The London and Sydney–based company, co-founded in April 2025, has already deployed robots in advanced manufacturing and electronics disassembly, and is now moving into a new fundraising phase.
Why it matters
The technology eliminates the need for specialist programmers when tasks or production processes change, letting factory workers themselves train robots on the job. This approach keeps workers central rather than replacing them, potentially opening robotics to smaller manufacturers who cannot afford custom programming. Early deployments show concrete productivity gains—Reimagine Robotics reduced prototyping time for new robot behaviors from roughly one day to around ten minutes, enabling faster workflow design.
What to watch
The company is entering a new fundraising round and planning to expand its team and deploy robots into more workplaces. It received pre-seed funding from venture capital firms Fly Ventures and firstminute capital, plus angel investors; the next phase will show whether each deployment makes subsequent ones faster and more reliable, as Scholz projects.
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Reimagine Robotics addresses a friction point in manufacturing: the high cost and time required to reprogram robots when workflows change. Traditional industrial robots require specialist engineers and weeks of setup; the company's approach lets production workers—who best understand the bottlenecks—train robots through live demonstration and correction. This model sidesteps not only the engineering bottleneck but also the organizational challenge of knowledge transfer, since the worker's understanding is encoded directly into the robot's behavior.
The early deployments reveal a second advantage: speed of iteration. By cutting prototyping time from approximately one day to around ten minutes, Reimagine Robotics has made robots useful as a real-time design tool, not just an execution tool. Teams can now experiment with robot-assisted workflows in the same conversation where they identify a problem. Scholz's framing—that robots should "arrive with the attitude of a new colleague"—reflects a philosophy that keeps humans in the design loop, which the company argues is both more practical and more acceptable to workers than full automation.
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