Swedish robotics startup 120ft Factory AB launched today with 576,000 euros ($644,000) in new funding from 22 angel investors to build autonomous microfactories run by humanoid robots.
120ft builds and operates small factories that fit inside three 40-foot shipping containers, and the combined length of those containers gives the company its name. Customers never buy a robot. Brands pay for each finished product and keep their existing component suppliers, which send parts to a 120ft site where robots shared among several customers handle final assembly, inspection and packing.
The first customers 120ft is chasing are design-led consumer brands, such as makers of small appliances and consumer electronics. Smaller brands can be forced to place production orders months before they know what will sell. Their parts often come from around the world and go to China for assembly before the finished goods are shipped back to Europe. The company frames that reliance 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. Every job runs in a simulation first. Missing information and bottlenecks are meant to show up there before production starts. Once a line is running, the company’s orchestration software coordinates robots, tooling and quality checks and decides what happens when a task fails.
120ft has 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 kept so that tasks can be reused and improved for later products. It took seven weeks in 2025 to teach the robots one end-to-end assembly skill, according to 120ft, and the same work now takes seven hours. The target for 2027 is seven minutes.
Martin Willers, 120ft’s founder and chief executive, started the Stockholm company 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.
Transparent is where he ran into the same ordering problem. The speaker maker could spend months waiting for thousands of products to arrive before it knew which colors customers wanted most, he recalled.
“For a smaller brand, that means tying up cash and making decisions about demand far too early,” Willers said.
120ft will put the funding toward reaching commercial production and further development of its software and factory infrastructure. Longer-term, the company plans to take the same local production model into repair, upgrades and remanufacturing.
The 22 angel investors include Ted Persson, co-head of EQT AB’s Scaleup Europe Fund; Sophia Bendz, a partner at Cherry Ventures Management GmbH; and Matthias Dantone, a co-founder of Fashwell AG, which Apple Inc. acquired. Sam Baker, an investor at Planet A Ventures with more than a decade in manufacturing, is also among them.
“A robot on its own does not solve the manufacturing problem,” Baker said. Brands also need tooling, software and quality control around the machines, in his view. Decentralized manufacturing capacity is part of Planet A’s thesis for how Europe regains its industrial autonomy, he added.