Tilman Tschoeke’s first day at RobCo was in the spring of 2022. The small-scale industrial robotics company was still tiny, with just 25 employees in their Munich office. It was a challenging time for European startups—the characteristic precarity of early-stage entrepreneurship was exacerbated by rising interest rates and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Companies were counting every euro carefully.

RobCo’s 28-year-old cofounder Roman Hölzl gave Tschoeke a laptop, informing his new head of finance that he’d have to bring his own charger. A few days into the job, Tschoeke was given access to the company’s bank account as he prepared to issue salary payments. At first glance, the numbers he saw there made no sense. He asked Hölzl if he could give him access to the second bank account, to which Hölzl replied, “Oh, there is no second account.” Tschoeke’s stomach sank. He could only choose to trust Hölzl’s seeming unflappability, which proved to be a sound judgement call when a well-timed payment from the company’s seed round arrived days later.

Tschoeke was beginning to appreciate that flirting with the boundaries of sensible and possible was just another weekday for Hölzl. It wouldn’t take long working with him before Tschoeke, like so many others who know the young CEO, came to understand that Hölzl views the world as a series of obstacles to surmount, odds to overcome and races to win. It’s a trait that has defined Hölzl’s triumphs. In the most immediate, physical sense, it has also led him to the edge of disaster.

Hölzl comes from a long line of competitive skiers. His paternal grandfather was a skier, having picked it up during an apprenticeship in post-World War II Switzerland. He eventually settled in Munich and ran a small butcher shop—exhausting manual labor that reliably put food on the table even during times of scarcity. Their three sons eventually took up teaching skiing to pay their way through school. 

When they weren’t skiing, both of Hölzl’s parents ran a small car dealership in Neuburg an der Donau, a calendar-pretty Bavarian town an hour north of Munich. In the winter, they would drive their sons, Roman and Florian, the three hours to the alps. By the time Roman was a teen, he was an instructor himself—a family vocation that Florian now sees as surprisingly apt preparation for his big brother’s work as a founder. It required keeping a cohort (of kids, usually) motivated to brave any sort of dreadful weather or scary terrain. Roman had to present himself as fearless to instill confidence in those who counted on him. 

The Hölzl brothers built their nerve by throwing themselves, often literally, into sports—tennis, swimming, trampolining, skateboarding, whatever. Roman was a stronger skier and more intense competitor than his younger brother, a trait Florian believes grew out of Roman’s obsession for optimizing his performance. Skiing, a sport where the smallest mistake can turn into a personal disaster, became Roman’s prime testing ground for visualizing a plan, experimenting at top speed, and applying learnings to future runs.

Most German school days ended at lunchtime. After school, when they lacked the hours necessary to drive to the slopes, they would scour the internet to find videos of new tricks, refine them on their trampoline, and then later experiment on the mountain. In the snowless summer they would lay down wooden pallets covered with fake grass near their home and lather soap on the pipe of a bicycle rack so they could slide on a rail.

By Roman’s mid-teens he was jumping, freestyling and competing constantly against the best skiers in Europe. “We did these 70-foot jumps—that’s double flips, three-and-a-half rotations, corkscrews,” he said. “Basically rotations out of your natural axes and back into it.” He was strong enough that he earned sponsorships from two French companies and was winning competitions with titles such as King of Shred. Well into secondary school, Germany’s education system still allowed him to manage his time as he saw fit. He would show up to class mainly just to take exams, while skiing close to a hundred days a year. His enviable LinkedIn summary of this professional period of his life reads, in part: “Backflips, deep snow, and great times!”

His grades were adequate but certainly not fantastic, and in the winter of 2012, his father challenged his then 18-year-old son to get better marks. If he could, they’d take a ski trip to Canada. Hölzl accepted and got the grades. The day before they were set to depart on their trip, they went skiing. That was when Hölzl took the worst fall of his life and suffered a compression fracture in two spots in his lower back.

He spent a night immobilized in the hospital in an awkward position that made his feet fall asleep. As he lay awake, he contemplated what his life would be if this was, in fact, paralysis. Years later, in hard moments with his startup, he would reflect on that long, numb night.

“If things go south at RobCo, I’m benchmarking against that,” Hölzl says, “which puts everything so much into perspective that company-building becomes a bit of a different beast. It will never be as bad as it was that night in March 2012.”

That next morning, imaging showed that his spinal nerves were fine; he would recover. His family moved his bed upstairs from the basement to the living room. There, as he convalesced, Hölzl had to remain still, really for the first time in his life. He had a lot of time to consider a future in which he might not ever be able to ski. “Having an injury where maybe there’s not going to be a next time,” his brother says, “it’s terrifying. But maybe for Roman, it was necessary to learn patience.”

After his injury, Hölzl spent weeks wearing a stabilizing exoskeleton to hold his spine in place. He spent the next season easing back onto the slopes but was far from competing. So what did he do with the other 80-or-so days that he otherwise would’ve been skiing? “That’s when I first started pouring energy into uni,” Hölzl said.

Over the course of the next few semesters, he went from the bottom 25% of his class to the top 3%. School was the new arena where he sized up the competition and was determined to come out on top. “You want to have that same feeling,” he says, “even if it’s an engineering event.”

For as long as he could remember, Hölzl was fascinated by the way his skis, boots and bindings enabled him to do things like launch himself down a mountain at explosive speeds and jump vast distances. “What I always found the most interesting was the intersection of humans and technology,” Hölzl said. “In skiing I witnessed how great it can be if things work out well with you and your technology. But also if it doesn’t go well, with a big crash.” Keen to explore that intersection, Hölzl pursued human factors engineering. 

In 2016 he enrolled at the Technical University of Munich, one of Europe’s best engineering universities. During those studies, he also completed a research fellowship at Harvard. His research tended to focus more on user experience—in robotics and autonomous driving—than on back-end engineering.

He met Constantin Dresel and Paul Maroldt when he began a Ph.D. program back at the Technical University of Munich in 2019. Together they ran a practical lab course in robotics and drilled into what they saw as the promise of modular robotics: developing industrial robots that were nimble, safe and able to be reconfigured quickly, thus opening a potentially huge market of smaller manufacturers that historically hadn’t been able to afford to automate manual tasks. The three men were able to plug into Munich’s hub of industry, taking advantage of weekly feedback from advisor companies and deploying prototypes, which gave them practical testing opportunities that validated their otherwise abstract mathematical work.

When the trio launched RobCo in 2020, it was a seamless move into commercializing the work they’d already been doing in the lab. From their time immersed with industry leaders, they understood that manufacturers were fretting over labor shortages that only promised to worsen in the coming years. RobCo aimed to create a robot capable of alleviating that labor shortage and drastically increasing productivity. Picture a programmable arm, perhaps about the size of a human arm or larger, that can do fine, complex manual tasks on repeat ad infinitum.

Two weeks after they claimed the name, they learned that the hit video game Fallout contains a multibillion-dollar robotics company called RobCo. Hölzl just thought it was short, easy and punchy. Now their YouTube videos are peppered with appreciative fan comments—“Ay when y’all releasing zeta invaders”—which gives the cofounders occasion to smile, to think how their startup is blurring the lines with science fiction.

The early-stage “kind of garage-style” company that Tilman Tschoeke took a chance on in 2022 was powered in large part by Hölzl’s sheer zeal. Hölzl’s fire impressed Tschoeke. “That’s clearly one of his key character traits—he’s very competitive, in a positive sense,” Tschoeke says.

Today, Hölzl’s typical pitch to potential clients begins, he says, with them pitching him. Companies want to know: Can you really do this? Can you install a robot that can laser-cut aluminum bicycle parts, for instance, or pack hearing aids and stack the boxes onto pallets? So RobCo’s opener is simple enough. You’re having trouble finding people. It’s only going to get worse. Let us automate some basic tasks for you. Hire our robots.

Roughly 70% of their customers had never used physical automation before. But all of a sudden the 150-year-old manufacturer de Crignis had RobCo arms molding sheet metal into cladding for machines, and Frank Präzisionsteile, a company that manufactures parts for aerospace and medical devices, had RobCo arms filling the overnight shifts no human workers wanted. And on and on.

RobCo’s modular arms are small enough that they don’t need to be bolted to factory floors. They can be up and running in a matter of a couple of days rather than weeks. “Many of those companies are really just lacking those people,” Hölzl said. “And we’ll see the labor time bomb basically ticking faster and faster in Germany between 2025 to 2028. That’s when the most people will go on pension ever in the history of the country.”

A RobCo robot costs a customer between 2,000 and 4,000 euros per month, or about a third of the cost of the two shift workers its labor can replicate. The size, speed and scale of their robots are what Hölzl calls, in a manner befitting a former elite athlete, “superhuman, but only a little bit.” The RobCo arms can move something that weighs 40 kilograms a few thousand times a day. Greater weights and distances require much more robust robots, the sort that larger factories have used for decades. RobCo has carved its niche in taking over discrete, standalone tasks that would usually require a human operator.

As for the humans building these machines, Hölzl and his cofounders have complementary strengths. In the early days, Dresel focused on the back-end software (the founders built their platform on C++, running on Linux). Maroldt was the hardware guy, the prototyper. Hölzl focused on user interfaces, designing them to be as seamless as possible.

“The best user interface is one that doesn’t exist, in a sense,” Hölzl said. “The key really is, which parts of the overall teaching of the user interface can you just abstract away?” For example: Their perception mechanism is so refined that a user can indicate to the robot a pickup point and a dropoff point for a part, and the robot can detect the rest—what the parts are, how to find and grab them, and how to place them where they need to go. Hölzl says that such a process would have previously required a programmer to feed the machine 50 separate instructions.

Sequoia came across RobCo in 2022 when a scout forwarded Luciana Lixandru the company’s deck. The premise was, essentially, “UiPath for the real world.” Lixandru, who had led the Series A for UiPath—a Romanian company that automates digital tasks, and which is now worth nearly $8 billion—latched onto the thesis. 

Upon meeting Hölzl, she knew he was a special founder: Hölzl’s switch from elite skiing to academic performance was unconventional but promising. “He’s honestly amazing,” she says. “He’s very articulate, very high IQ, very ambitious, very competitive. At Sequoia, all our partners are really competitive. You put him at that table and he still might be the most competitive person there.” Lixandru recalls putting Hölzl in touch with a colleague of hers, a fellow German, and the two eventually met up. The colleague later reported back that they’d taken a nice Sunday bike ride. “And then, when I talked to Roman,” Lixandru says, “he was like ‘We had a biking race.’” 

Hölzl was surprised when he first heard from Sequoia; he thought RobCo, as a robotics firm, wouldn’t appeal to venture capitalists who tend to back software companies. The great drawback of robotics is that unlike software, robots are made of stuff. “With software, you build one product and you sell it a million times,” Lixandru said. “Here you have to rebuild every single product that you build and then go deploy it. And you have to do this in a smooth, capital-efficient way.” Eventually the goal is to expand across the globe—the U.S. market remains the ultimate prize—but scaling robotics is an even greater feat than scaling software. Every unit has to be built, shipped, installed and monitored. Sequoia is betting that Germany, a hub of mid-sized engineering and manufacturing companies, is the right place to start scaling.

In one sense, RobCo keeps pushing so fast by doing the least. Rather than dabble in theoretical solutions, the company builds only the specific features its clients ask for and need. Tschoeke says that his CEO has the charisma to sell and to communicate a vision, as well as the technical background to resolve customers’ engineering concerns. “He’s very to the point,” Tschoeke says of Hölzl. “Whatever the question is, he has answers. And I think that’s his biggest strength.”

RobCo is now approaching 100 employees, supplying small- and mid-sized manufacturers in Germany with its robotic arms. The company is filling a market niche that Hölzl believes may include tens of thousands of companies. As RobCo reaches more customers, it’s also gathering data with a long-term aim of making robots that work even in unstructured use cases. 

“In Germany we have a quote that means, basically, ‘Impossible is nothing,’” Tschoeke says. “From a technical perspective, when they say, ‘OK, no, we cannot do it in two quarters because typically it takes a year,’ we say, ‘OK, let’s do it in one quarter.’ And we’ve proved it many times. This comes strongly from Roman. He is always pushing that balance pretty strongly.”

Hölzl misses his skiing days. His life now is spent in the office six days a week obsessing over RobCo. Get him talking about skiing and you can hear the joy in his voice. From RobCo’s HQ in Munich, he’s a short drive from alpine skiing. But when he daydreams, it’s of western Canada or of Hokkaido. Japan, he says, has the greatest snow in the world.

He and Florian recently splurged on a first for them: skiing in the Caucasus Mountains. Florian traveled to Georgia from Germany; his brother arrived directly from a work trip abroad, feeling a little worse for wear amid all the travel. They headed to a tiny village where the next morning, a man wearing ski boots picked them up in a Ford Raptor pickup truck. He drove them to a clearing outside town where a helicopter flew them to 15,000 feet and they got a glimpse of Russia before they dropped into virgin mountainside powder.

Florian remembers it as a sublime day on the mountain. He also watched his brother closely. After a few runs, Hölzl was actually the one to beg off early. His schedule had caught up with him, and in a moment of uncharacteristic restraint, he decided not to push himself to the absolute brink.

They left the mountain with light still in the sky. After two days of rest—an eon for any founder to put everything on pause but an eternity for this one—he finally felt right. On the third day, Hölzl began to bang out emails and take calls. “He was hyped to work again,” Florian says, “because he had so many ideas.” Florian felt that he was witnessing an understanding dawn on his brother in real time: Not every race in Roman Hölzl’s life required a headlong sprint, it turns out. It took Hölzl a mere three decades on skis to learn that he, too, is only human—a realization that just might help sustain his human-augmenting robotics company for years to come.