Extend Robotics raises GBP 2.6 million Pre-A to sell factories finished work instead of robots

Extend Robotics said in a company announcement dated Sep 28 that it closed a GBP 2.6 million Pre-A round led by Skyworks Venture Capital Fund, with Neo Venture (Europe) and Zip Capital participating. The Reading-based company said the money will scale its Result-as-a-Service offer across UK and European industry and build out a network of remote robot operators. No valuation was given.

The business model is the news. Extend does not sell robots; customers pay for completed work, priced against output, and the company carries the cycle-time and success-rate risk. Its AMAS platform lets an operator with no robotics background drive a robot arm or humanoid through an immersive 3D interface while AI handles routine steps, and the company said the data it collects in operation makes each deployment more autonomous over time. Founder and chief executive Chang Liu framed it as selling the job getting done to finance directors who will not approve a robot that might not work.

The company pointed to live use. At Adrian Scripps, one of the UK's largest apple growers, an Extend humanoid does quality control on a working packing line, a deployment it showed at the Google DeepMind Robotics Accelerator Demo Day in September; Extend was one of twelve companies in that three-month programme. It also trained a robot to fit high-voltage Master Service Disconnect units and runs a spray-painting deployment. Extend was named an official integrator for Unitree Robotics in January and says it has 35 subscription customers across automotive, aerospace, nuclear, robotics and agriculture, with revenue doubling year on year for three straight years. Liu, a former Imperial College London postdoctoral researcher, founded the company in 2021.

In MEKAWIRE's database the round is smaller than any of the six 2026 robotics seed and pre-seed rounds with a disclosed dollar amount, the smallest of which is Tangent Robotics' $4.5 million (as of Oct 14, 2026). The largest UK robotics round of 2026 in our database is still Humanoid's $152 million Series A in July. Extend's case for small capital is that pay-per-output contracts let customers fund deployments out of operating budgets; the open question is whether a remote operator network can stay profitable once per-task prices are set by output rather than by hours.