120ft is raising angel funding to build autonomous microfactories powered by humanoid robots

Swedish robotics startup 120ft Factory AB today launched construction of autonomous microfactories run by humanoid robots with €576,000 ($644,000) in new funding from 22 angel investors.

120ft builds and operates small factories that fit into three 40-foot shipping containers, and the overall length of these containers gives the company its name. Customers never buy a robot. Brands pay for each finished product and retain their existing component suppliers, who send parts to a 120-foot facility where robots shared by multiple customers handle final assembly, inspection and packaging.

The first customers 120ft is targeting are design-focused consumer brands, such as small appliance and consumer electronics manufacturers. Smaller brands may be forced to place production orders months before they know what will sell. Their parts often come from around the world and are sent to China for assembly before the finished goods are shipped back to Europe. The company describes its dependence on distant factories as a geopolitical risk.

On the production side, 120ft’s software takes product designs, parts lists and quality requirements and converts them into digital instructions. Each job is first executed in a simulation. Missing information and bottlenecks should appear there before production begins. Once a line is up and running, the company’s orchestration software coordinates robots, tools and quality checks and decides what happens if a task fails.

120ft demonstrated the system on a lamp, with robots assembling a cylinder lock and threading the lamp socket before performing a functional test. Instructions and data from each production run are retained so tasks can be reused and improved for later products. According to 120ft, in 2025 it took seven weeks to teach robots an end-to-end assembly skill, and the same job now takes seven hours. The target for 2027 is seven minutes.

Martin Willers, founder and CEO of 120ft, founded the Stockholm company in 2025. He previously built and sold hardware design company People People AB and co-founded Transparent AB, a Swedish manufacturer of repairable and upgradeable speakers.

He encountered the same ordering problem at Transparent. The speaker maker could spend months waiting for thousands of products to arrive before knowing which colors customers wanted most, he recalled.

“For a smaller brand, that means tying up money and making decisions about demand way too early,” said Willers.

120ft will use the funds for commercial production and further development of its software and factory infrastructure. Longer term, the company plans to use the same local production model for repairs, upgrades and remanufactures.

The 22 angel investors include Ted Persson, co-head of EQT AB’s Scaleup Europe Fund; Sophia Bendz, partner at Cherry Ventures Management GmbH; and Matthias Dantone, co-founder of Fashwell AG, which acquired Apple Inc. They include Sam Baker, an investor at Planet A Ventures with more than a decade of manufacturing experience.

“A robot alone doesn’t solve the manufacturing problem,” Baker said. He believes brands also need tools, software and quality control around the machines. Decentralized production capacity is part of Planet A’s thesis for how Europe can regain its industrial autonomy, he added.

Image: 120 feet