SA’s most valuable firm invests in robots that can learn ‘every possible sequence of actions’

In an interview with Crunchbase, the CEO of Flexion, Nikita Rudin, noted that their company is unlike other robotics companies.

“Unlike companies focused on a single robot form factor or on narrow behaviors, our system is built to work across morphologies and tasks, making it a true general-purpose intelligence layer for robotics,” he stated.

“Most players in the market today are taking teleoperations-heavy approaches, which require hundreds of thousands of hours of manual human demonstrations, an approach we believe is fundamentally unscalable in the long run,” Sandeep Bakshi, head of Europe investments for Prosus Ventures, stated.

“Robotic foundation model developers will eventually need to heavily leverage simulation-based training, and the Flexion team is best suited to win with this approach,” he added.

Prosus’s investment in tech propelled it to a 99% surge in its adjusted half-year core profit.

Prosus reported earnings before interest, taxes,‌ depreciation, and amortisation of $423 million from $213 million a year ago, while revenue jumped ‌22% to $3.6 billion, driven by robust results from its iFood and OLX platforms, as seen on Yahoo Finance.

In Europe, the firm is incorporating its 4.1 billion euro ($4.7 billion) purchase of Just Eat Takeaway.

Additionally, in September, it announced a $1.3 billion plan to buy the French classifieds network La Centrale.

In November, Reuters revealed that it had expressed early interest in the German auto marketplace Mobile.de.

Prosus has put $146 million into online travel agency Ixigo and $350 million into ride-hailing company Rapido in India.

In the meantime, its Latin American iFood division acquired a portion of CRMBonus, a financial technology company, and was apparently in advanced negotiations to purchase Alelo, a benefits provider, for $905 million.

Flexion, a Zurich-based company, was founded in January by former Nvidia researchers Nikita Rudin, CTO David Hoeller, Julian Nubert, and Fabian Tischhauser.

The startup intends to establish a U.S. headquarters in the Bay Area with some of its new funding.

Flexion’s technology, which uses simulation-first reinforcement learning, allows robots to gain thousands of hours of experience per day in high-fidelity virtual environments.

“Training robots with data collected manually for every possible scenario is a dead end. The real world is far too rich and unpredictable: every object, every surface, every motion multiplies the number of potential edge cases,” Flexion says.

“Luckily, we don’t have to brute-force it. Instead of attempting to teach a robot every possible sequence of actions, we can give it access to a toolbox of reusable skills, each trained for reliability, and then orchestrate them with foundation models that understand the world,” it adds.