Cognibotics: EIC Accelerator Bet on Long-Reach Picking Robots

Warehouse robots tend to come in two kinds: six-axis arms that reach far but move slowly, and delta robots that pick fast but only over a small table. Cognibotics, a robotics company in Lund, says its HKM1800 combines the two. Its hybrid kinematic arm, made of carbon fibre and weighing about 25 kilograms, carries up to 7.5 kilograms over an 1,800 millimetre reach and, the company says, makes more than 2,000 picks an hour across about ten square metres, according to its controller supplier KEBA and Hannover Messe.

The European Innovation Council announced on 15 June 2026 that 38 companies had been selected in its latest Accelerator round, and named Cognibotics among five highlighted examples. CORDIS records a grant agreement signed on 28 September 2026, with an EU contribution of €2,498,422 for a project running from 1 October 2026 to 30 September 2028. The project is five weeks old, so this article sets out what was promised and what can already be checked.

A calibration company that built a robot

Cognibotics was founded in 2013 by robotics researchers from Lund, according to Hannover Messe and Nordic9, which put the founding team at six scientists. Its first EU project, AROBMACH, was a €50,000 SME Instrument Phase 1 study in 2018 for Millbot, an add-on meant to bring industrial robots to the 0.2 millimetre accuracy needed for metal machining. The CORDIS summary describes the company as a Lund University spin-off that had worked with ABB, Comau and KUKA as a consultant since 2014.

That accuracy work is still a business. In March 2026 the company announced an order of about SEK 16 million for its CogniCal calibration software from an industrial robot manufacturer it does not name, which Robotics and Automation News reported as worth about $1.7 million. In January 2026 the US cobot maker Standard Bots selected the same calibration for its next robot platform, with its chief executive Evan Beard quoted in the company's release.

The HKM1800 is a different kind of product: a whole robot rather than software for someone else's. KEBA says the arm was working in the lab in January 2023, was shown at automatica in Munich that year, and that the first installed unit went into a pilot at Nowaste Logistics at the end of February 2024. Cognibotics told KEBA that using its KeMotion control platform cut development time by a factor of four.

How the arm differs

HKM stands for hybrid kinematic manipulator: an arm that mixes the parallel linkages of a delta robot, which keep the moving mass low, with the serial joints of a conventional arm, which give reach. The CORDIS objective frames the trade-off directly: six-axis robots "are flexible but heavy and slow, while delta robots are fast but constrained to small workspaces." The company pairs the arm with its own Juliet and Romeo motion software and claims up to a third less energy use than conventional robots, a figure repeated in its June 2026 release and in the CORDIS summary. Neither source gives the comparison robot or the test behind it.

The speed claim is easier to place. Fredrik Malmgren, the chief executive, told Hannover Messe that a person keeps up 300 to 500 pick-and-place cycles an hour, against more than 2,000 for the HKM1800. Those are the company's figures for the robot in isolation, not for a warehouse cell where vision, grasping and the supply of bins also set the pace.

Where the robot runs

Three logistics names are attached to the HKM1800 in public sources. The most advanced is Nowaste Logistics, a Swedish third-party logistics provider in Helsingborg. In a release of 5 January 2026, Cognibotics announced that Nowaste had ordered a second picking cell after the first ran in production with "stable performance and reliable uptime", picking from an AutoStore system supplied by Swisslog with a vision system from Sics.AI. Robotics and Automation News carried the same account, and Dagens PS had described the Helsingborg installation in July 2025. Neither release gives a throughput or uptime figure.

The second is Boozt, the Nordic online fashion retailer. Cognibotics announced a pilot on 23 December 2025 in which the robot moves items from AutoStore bins straight into bags or boxes. Boozt's fulfilment technology chief, Tobias Sjölin, is quoted saying that if the pilot performs as expected, the set-up could become "a scalable building block" for growth; the release, also reported by Robotics and Automation News, names no pilot length or result.

The third is a sales channel: the warehouse automation company MovU Robotics sells the arm as its eligo picking station, as reported in March 2025 ahead of LogiMAT. MovU's picking manager, Steven Mouws, was quoted saying it "runs double the productivity rates" of other solutions the company had tried. No unit sales figure for the channel has been published.

What the EIC project promises

The CORDIS objective says the HKM1800 prototype is at technology readiness level 6 and has "demonstrated initial functionality in relevant industrial environments", but that the pilots "identified crucial areas for improvement" which form the basis of the project. The plan is to take the robot to TRL 9 by adding AI-based perception and autonomy, better control of the arm's elastic behaviour, simpler operator interfaces, certified industrial production and a final round of pilot validation. The target markets named are e-commerce fulfilment, post and parcel handling and small-parts manufacturing.

Ideon Science Park, citing a report by Rapidus, wrote in August 2026 that the money will fund five pilot installations with customers in logistics and manufacturing in Central and Northern Europe, due to start in the first half of 2027, and that Cognibotics will for the first time supply both the robots and the complete software. Those customers are not named.

1. Working prototype in industrial useIn placeRunning at Nowaste since February 2024, per KEBA and the January 2026 release; a second cell ordered.
2. More than 2,000 picks an hourCompany figureStated by the company; no customer has published a measured rate.
3. AI perception, elastic control, operator interfaceToo earlyProject started 1 October 2026; no report yet on CORDIS.
4. Certified industrial production and TRL 9Too earlyDue by September 2028.
5. Five customer pilotsPlannedFirst half of 2027, per Ideon; customers unnamed.

The money

The company announced a €6.5 million package of a €2.5 million grant and €4 million of equity, figures repeated by Robotics and Automation News. CORDIS records only the grant. The EIC's own notice says equity for the round is "set aside" for potential investments by the EIC Fund; no completed EIC Fund investment in Cognibotics has been published, so the equity part is a selection, not a closed deal.

Earlier private funding is thinly documented. Nordic9 reported a SEK 40 million Series A in March 2020 from Tibia Konsult and Fairpoint Capital, and gave the company about 20 staff and SEK 8.8 million of sales in 2018. The business data site Funnelfeedr lists the company as an active aktiebolag with 33 employees and SEK 37.2 million of revenue, without saying which year. The filed annual accounts at Bolagsverket could not be retrieved for this article, so no profit, loss or equity figure is given here.

The European case

The CORDIS objective places the project under the Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform, which names robotics as a critical technology, and argues that the field is "currently dominated by US and Asian providers." The project's own argument is that dense, high-throughput warehouses have been uneconomical for existing robots. A European picking arm for e-commerce warehouses fits that policy case; whether it becomes a supply-chain asset depends on the volumes it reaches, which no source yet shows.

Cognibotics was not asked for comment for this article. The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.