Inbolt, a French developer of 3D vision and AI guidance software for industrial robots, has raised $12.5M in a round led by Shift4Good. Bridges Climate Transition Partners joined as a new investor, and existing backers BNP Paribas Développement and Ora Global also participated. Total funding now stands at $34M.
The money goes toward expansion in the US, where Inbolt opened a Detroit office in 2026, and in APAC. It also funds entry into two new sectors, data centers and electronics manufacturing.
Inbolt's system pairs 3D vision with a hardware-agnostic AI software layer that lets a robot perceive its environment and adjust its control loops in real time. It runs natively on FANUC, ABB, KUKA, Yaskawa, Comau and Universal Robots arms, and the company says it can be added to new or existing lines without replacing installed equipment. Inbolt says the system is trained on a CAD model in minutes and handles part localization and trajectory control on moving lines.
For automation engineers, the retrofit path is the practical detail. According to Inbolt, a robot that cannot sense part misalignment or tooling wear will stall, throw an error or produce a defective part. A 2025 ABB survey of 3,600 industrial leaders, cited by the company, found unplanned downtime can cost as much as $500,000 an hour, and 44 percent of respondents reported equipment-related stoppages at least monthly.
Inbolt says it is deployed on more than 200 robots in more than 100 factories across three continents. Named customers include Bosch, Beko, Flex, Ford, Stellantis and Toyota. The company ranked third on the Sifted 100: France & Benelux, a list of the region's fastest-growing startups, with a two-year revenue CAGR of over 500 percent. The New York Times reported that Inbolt's deployment helped a Stellantis assembly plant in Detroit become a top performer in the company.
"There are nearly 5 million industrial robots in factories across the world, mostly running blind," said Christophe Defert, partner at Bridges Climate Transition Partners.
