Swedish robotics startup 120ft Factory AB has launched with €576,000, or about $644,000, in new funding from 22 angel investors to build autonomous microfactories run by humanoid robots. The company, based in Stockholm, announced the round on October 15, 2026, and plans to use the money to reach commercial production and to keep developing its software and factory infrastructure.

The concept is built around shipping containers. Each 120ft site fits inside three 40-foot containers, and their combined length gives the company its name. Customers never buy a robot. Instead, brands pay for each finished product and keep their existing component suppliers, who send parts to a 120ft site where robots shared among several customers handle final assembly, inspection and packing.

The first customers 120ft is targeting are design-led consumer brands, such as makers of small appliances and consumer electronics. Smaller brands often have to place production orders months before they know what will sell, and their parts frequently travel around the world to China for assembly before finished goods are shipped back to Europe. The company frames that dependence on distant factories as a geopolitical risk, and positions local, flexible production as the alternative.

Software is the core of the system. 120ft's platform takes product designs, parts lists and quality requirements and converts them into digital instructions. Every job runs in a simulation first, so missing information and bottlenecks surface before production starts. Once a line is live, orchestration software coordinates the robots, tooling and quality checks, and decides what happens when a task fails.

The company has already demonstrated the system on a lamp, with robots assembling a cylinder lock and threading the bulb fitting before running a functional test. Instructions and data from each production run are stored so that tasks can be reused and improved for later products. Learning speed is the headline metric: according to 120ft, it took seven weeks in 2025 to teach the robots one end-to-end assembly skill, the same work now takes seven hours, and the target for 2027 is seven minutes.

Founder and chief executive Martin Willers started 120ft in 2025. He previously built and sold hardware design firm People People AB and co-founded Transparent AB, a Swedish maker of repairable, upgradable speakers. It was at Transparent that he met the ordering problem 120ft now targets, since the speaker maker could wait months for thousands of products to arrive before knowing which colors customers wanted most. For smaller brands, Willers says, this ties up cash and forces demand decisions far too early.

The round brought in recognizable names from European venture and startup circles. The 22 angels include Ted Persson, co-head of EQT's Scaleup Europe Fund; Sophia Bendz, a partner at Cherry Ventures; and Matthias Dantone, co-founder of Fashwell, which Apple acquired. Sam Baker of Planet A Ventures, who has more than a decade of manufacturing experience, also invested. Baker's view is that machines are only one piece of the puzzle, since brands also need tooling, software and quality control around them, and he sees decentralized manufacturing capacity as part of how Europe can regain industrial autonomy.

Looking ahead, 120ft plans to take the same local production model beyond assembly into repair, upgrades and remanufacturing. For a startup that is still moving toward commercial production, the early funding is modest, but the idea of shared humanoid robots serving several brands from compact, container-sized factories gives investors and manufacturers a new model to watch as demand grows for shorter, more resilient supply chains.