Polish Startup Nomagic Deploys AI Brain for Warehouse Robots at Swiss Client

Warsaw-based Nomagic announced that it has become one of the first companies in the world to deploy a vision-language-action model, or VLA, in a real production environment at paying customers rather than just in lab conditions. The new system, which the company calls the robots' AI brain, has cut by half the number of situations in which a robot needs to ask for human help.

Who's behind the project

Nomagic's new AI lab is led by Markus Wulfmeier, a former Google DeepMind researcher who previously held a key role on the Gemini Robotics team. Wulfmeier also carried out postdoctoral research at the Oxford Robotics Institute and the University of Oxford, and held research stints at UC Berkeley, ETH Zurich, and MIT. His move to the Polish company is one of the more striking examples of top robotics researchers leaving major AI labs for smaller, specialized startups.

Wulfmeier frames the company's philosophy differently from most competitors working on general-purpose robotics. Rather than aiming straight for a universal robot brain capable of everything, Nomagic is focused on mastering specific tasks, such as order packing, and only then plans to build more general systems on that foundation.

Most of our community is racing to build the most general robot brain possible - Markus Wulfmeier, Chief Scientist at Nomagic

What the numbers show

The key metric the company cites is a roughly 50 percent reduction in how often robots have to stop work and ask for human intervention. That's a practical measure of a system's maturity in production, since every such intervention slows the whole process and requires an operator to be present at the packing line. At the same time, the company notes that its VLA models don't yet hit 99.9 percent reliability fully autonomously, and stresses that no vendor deployed at customers has reached that stage yet.

Nomagic CEO Kacper Nowicki stresses that for industrial customers, that reliability threshold isn't a marketing gimmick but a hard condition for letting a robot onto the floor.

99.9 percent isn't a marketing number, it's the cost of being allowed into the building - Kacper Nowicki, CEO of Nomagic

First deployment client

The first partner running the new VLA model in production is Brack.Alltron, Switzerland's second-largest e-commerce platform. Company founder Roland Brack praises Nomagic's robots for actually understanding their surroundings rather than just executing rigidly programmed movement sequences. Nomagic also serves Zalando, where the scale of operations is far larger: two million successful package-packing operations per month.

The company can also point to industry recognition beyond financial figures. Its Shoebox Picker robot, designed to handle the tricky task of packing shoe boxes without knocking off their lids, won the 2026 International Intralogistics and Forklift Truck of the Year award in the piece-picking robotics innovation category.

Significance for Poland's AI scene

Nomagic is one of the few Polish tech startups competing directly on the physical AI frontier, that is, combining large AI models with real robots operating in customer warehouses across Western Europe. Landing a researcher of Wulfmeier's caliber from Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics team at a Warsaw-based company shows that Polish teams can attract talent that competes for jobs with the world's biggest AI labs.

For Poland's logistics and e-commerce market, it's a signal that VLA-based automation is moving past the experimental stage and becoming a real operational alternative already being tested by major regional retail platforms. If the claimed reduction in human interventions holds up as the system scales to more customers, it could speed up investment decisions at other warehouse operators considering similar systems.

Sources: Nomagic AI lab led by former Google DeepMind researcher claims success with 'AI brain' for robots (fortune.com), Nomagic puts an AI brain into live warehouse robots (thenextweb.com)