Zurich-based Forgis has emerged from stealth with a new brand and a $4.5 million pre-seed round to accelerate what it calls a new era of “industrial intelligence” for Western manufacturing. Formerly known as Xelerit, the company is building AI-native orchestration infrastructure that sits at the edge of the factory floor and coordinates machines, robots, and sensors in real time. The fresh capital will support product development, hiring, and early deployments across automotive and advanced manufacturing customers.
Rebrand Marks New Chapter
The rebrand from Xelerit to Forgis signals a broader ambition to become a foundational software layer for factories rather than a niche automation tool. The name Forgis, a blend of “forge” and “genesis,” reflects the company’s intent to help spark a new industrial revolution rooted in software-defined production. Its vision is to make factory automation as plug-and-play for engineers as personal computing became for office workers in the early Microsoft era.
Pre-Seed Round and Investor Backing
Forgis has secured $4.5 million in pre-seed funding in a round led by Swiss venture capital firm redalpine. The round also attracted participation from Massimo Banzi, co-founder of Arduino, alongside a group of deep tech and manufacturing-focused backers, including Venture Kick, Founderful Campus, S2S Ventures, Talent Kick, and Gebert Rüf Stiftung. The company plans to use the financing to expand its engineering team, scale pilot projects, and deepen integrations with established industrial vendors.
Addressing Europe’s Manufacturing Gap
Forgis positions its technology as a response to what its founders describe as a structural lag in Western manufacturing. While Europe still designs many of the world’s most advanced products, much of the production footprint has shifted eastward and many factories remain saddled with aging systems that do not interoperate. Forgis argues that reconnecting machines, robots, and controllers through a modern software layer is essential if Europe is to reshore production capacity and compete with highly automated plants abroad.
Platform and Technology Vision
At the core of Forgis is edge software that connects machines, PLCs, and robots from multiple brands into a unified, AI-enabled control layer. This infrastructure is designed to monitor operations continuously, adapt production logic on the fly, and over time create self-improving systems capable of diagnosing inefficiencies and proposing corrective actions. The platform is already being deployed in collaboration with IBM and is compatible with equipment from major industrial players such as Siemens and ABB.
Rapid Fundraising Journey
The fundraising process itself underlines investor appetite for the company’s thesis on industrial software. According to the founders, Forgis received five term sheets, three from US investors and two from European funds, ultimately choosing to partner with redalpine after an intensive 36-hour diligence sprint. The decision to anchor the round in Europe was framed as a deliberate move to build a category-defining industrial software company from within the continent’s manufacturing base rather than relocating to the United States.
Community Engagement Through Robotics
To mark the rebrand and funding announcement, Forgis organized a public event at ETH Zurich’s Polyterrasse featuring a “Grandmaster Chess Robot.” Visitors were invited to play against the robot in live matches, with online content from the activation already reaching more than two million views. The company used the event to convene startup founders, investors, and manufacturing executives, underscoring its strategy of building a community at the intersection of robotics, AI, and industrial operations.
Forgis is led by co-founders Federico Martelli, Camilla Mazzoleni, and Riccardo Maggioni, who bring experience across automation, robotics, and industrial software. With new capital, a sharpened brand, and early partnerships in place, the startup is positioning itself as a “Windows for factories” that can abstract away the complexity of diverse industrial hardware. If its platform can deliver on the promise of plug-and-play automation at scale, Forgis could become a central player in the effort to bring high-value manufacturing back to Western markets.