ANYbotics is a Zurich-based robotics company, founded in 2016, that builds and services ANYmal, a four-legged autonomous inspection robot for heavy industry. It is arguably the most infrastructure-native firm in this cohort: its customers are not logistics warehouses but oil and gas operators, utilities, metals producers and grid companies, including bp, Equinor, ENI, Petrobras, SLB, Siemens Energy and GE Vernova.
The company has shipped more than 200 robots, and its fleet performs thousands of inspections a week. In September 2025, Climate Investment joined a shareholder register that already included Aramco Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Qualcomm Ventures, Swisscom Ventures and TDK Ventures, taking total funding to more than $150m.
ANYmal is a ruggedised quadruped that walks routine inspection rounds in plants designed for human legs: stairs, gratings, tight corridors. It carries visual and thermal cameras, lidar and acoustic sensors, and autonomously reads gauges, detects equipment overheating and abnormal vibration, and, with recently added gas-leak detection and acoustic imaging payloads, localises leaks and measures ambient gas concentrations. The proven anchor is old and specific: in September 2018 an ANYmal spent a week performing autonomous inspection missions on a TenneT offshore converter platform roughly 100km out in the North Sea, climbing stairs and navigating the installation on its own sensors.
That deployment, on exactly the asset class the offshore wind build-out is multiplying, demonstrated the core proposition, and the company was candid about the limit: the robot is a problem detector, not a problem solver, and manipulation of tools and valves remains beyond it. Since then the offer has matured into commercial fleet operations, including at the Northern Lights carbon capture and storage facility in Norway. The next step is ANYmal X, which ANYbotics describes as the first Ex-certified legged robot for explosive atmospheres, with customer deliveries planned for 2026 — the variant that refineries, tank farms and offshore process areas actually require.
Here the honest position matters: we have found no UK or Irish commercial deployment on record. The relevance is a mapping, not yet a fact. The map is nonetheless compelling. The 2018 proof was an offshore transmission platform, and the UK is building more of that asset class than almost anyone: offshore substations and converter platforms for the offshore wind pipeline are remote, unmanned by design, and expensive to visit by crew transfer vessel or helicopter — precisely the economics that justified TenneT's trial.
Onshore, the same logic covers transmission substations, refineries and terminals, where the Ex-certified ANYmal X would be the qualifying product. Several of ANYbotics' named customers, bp and Equinor among them, operate assets in the UK North Sea. A company that sells and services worldwide, with that customer list, does not need to change strategy for a UK deployment to happen; it needs a purchase order.
The single signal that would settle the question is a first verified UK or Irish commercial deployment — a named site, not a demonstration. Candidates worth monitoring: any UK offshore wind operator or offshore transmission owner trialling legged inspection; existing ANYbotics customers extending fleets to UK North Sea assets; and the first ANYmal X delivery to a UK-regulated hazardous area, which would test the Ex certification against UK site-acceptance regimes.
The thesis would be undermined if, two years from now, worldwide sales still show a UK-shaped hole, that would suggest a structural barrier, whether in procurement, regulation or channel, rather than simple lag. Our judgment is that the worldwide sales and service footprint makes UK or Irish deployment a matter of time, which is why the company is treated as having evidenced relevance rather than merely being watched; readers should hold us to logging the first verified UK deployment when it appears.
Sources: spectrum.ieee.org · eu-startups.com · therobotreport.com
Entries are verified against primary sources. The bar is the frontier: first-of-kind, new technology, new materials — delivery milestones of conventional infrastructure, however large, do not qualify. The frontier is tracked globally; every entry states what it means for UK and Irish infrastructure.
Verified by GridteamAI.
