RoboTwin's EIC Accelerator Lets Workers Teach the Robot

An industrial robot is cheap compared with the cost of telling it what to do. Programming a trajectory for a new part takes an engineer days, which is why automation works for car plants making a million identical pieces and not for the small factories that make a hundred. RoboTwin, founded in Prague in 2021, hands the problem to the person who already knows the job: a worker performs the task once holding a sensor-equipped device, and no-code software converts the movement into a robot program, typically in about a minute.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, Neurofabrix, at its March 2025 cut-off for blended finance, and CORDIS records a grant of €2,199,154 from October 2025 to September 2027 to finish the system, productise it and scale it with feedback from industrial pilots. The next generation, the project says, would generate programs automatically from an object's shape using an AI knowledge model, with workers supervising and correcting it.

The jobs it started with

RoboTwin's focus is narrow and well chosen. "We started with jobs that are ugly, dirty and unhealthy for workers to do manually," co-founder Megi Mejdrechová told Horizon Magazine in March 2026: spray painting, powder coating and polishing, where the skill lives in a worker's hand movement and the working conditions are poor. The device works with a range of industrial robots including collaborative ones, and the pitch is that automation becomes practical for small batches and products that change often.

Two quotes from the company describe the actual mechanism well. "The robot basically copies the human demonstration," and "people with no coding skills can transfer their know-how and experience to robots." A robotics specialist at the company adds that the device teaches the robot both the precise trajectory needed and information about its surroundings.

Partners who sell to factories

The company's route to market is through integrators rather than direct sales, which suits a small firm: RobPainting in the Netherlands robotises painting for small and medium manufacturers, Surfin Technology in Czechia does robotic coating, and Innovative Finishing Solutions takes the technology to North American customers. The EIC funding is to expand to manufacturers in central Europe, the Netherlands, Mexico and Canada.

What is not public is scale: no number of installations, no revenue, no cycle-time or quality data from a factory, and no result from the pilot programme the grant is funding. CORDIS shows no periodic report. For a tool whose claim is that it saves engineering time, the obvious missing figure is a before-and-after from a real customer.

1. Teaching by demonstrationWorkingDevice and no-code software in use with partners.
2. Integration partnersThreeNetherlands, Czechia and Canada.
3. Automatic program generation from shapeNext generationThe AI model is what the grant is meant to finish.
4. Industrial pilot resultsNot reportedThe pilot programme is a project deliverable.

A small company funded by the EU twice over

RoboTwin's pre-seed round in July 2025 was itself a blend of private capital and an EU grant, reported at about €1.25 million, with the European Institute of Innovation and Technology among the backers, and the company has also used Women TechEU and EU support to exhibit at Hannover Messe. The EIC grant of €2.2 million is nearly twice that round. The award is blended finance and no EIC Fund equity has been announced.

Automation for the factories Europe actually has

Europe's manufacturing base is dominated by small and medium companies that cannot justify robot integration costs, while labour for exactly the jobs RoboTwin targets, spraying and polishing, is scarce and the work is unhealthy. About 23,000 new robots went into automotive production lines in 2024, but that is the easy end of the market. A tool that lets a skilled worker program a robot in a minute addresses the part of European industry that automation has not reached, which is why this project's digital and AI trackers are both at 100%.