While the whole industry is infatuated with humanoid robots that resemble people, a firm from Barcelona has raised 85 million dollars on the opposite idea - a robot that does not resemble anything in particular. Theker calls it "the largest Series A for robotics in the history of Europe", and for now there really is no bigger one to be found.

The logic is simple and that is precisely what makes it interesting. Unlike robots with a fixed form - the kind Boston Dynamics builds - Theker's machines are built to reconfigure. The arms, the hands and the whole form change or adapt to the task: today it sorts packages, tomorrow it packs clothes, the day after it lines up bottles and cans in a warehouse. Instead of one robot for one job, one robot that changes outfits for each.

Who stands behind the idea says everything about the ambition. Among the early investors is Inditex, the parent company of Zara - which is no accident, since retail is the first target. But the goal is bigger: heavy industry and manufacturing, where manual tasks are more complex and more massive than lining up T-shirts. Theker is already among the European startups being watched closely, and it is raising money accordingly.

Behind every story like this sits the same quiet reason - a shortage of labour. Manufacturers are not waiting for robots to become perfect; they are waiting for them to become good enough to fill the places people no longer want to work. The question no one writes out loud in the press release is what happens to those jobs once the machine that changes outfits actually starts working. For a region like the Balkans, which has for decades exported exactly that manual labour to European factories, this is not distant news - it is a hint that the work people go abroad for may not wait much longer.