Not every founder gets to the finish line together. By 2020, Magazino's team of three founders was down to two: Nikolas Engelhard, one of the original trio who built the company out of a Technical University of Munich research environment, had left and later turned up at another Munich firm, Motius.
That quiet departure sits inside a louder story. Magazino began in 2014, in Munich, with a hard bet: that a robot could do what warehouse automation had mostly avoided, picking single boxes of mixed sizes from normal shelves without a rebuilt warehouse around it. Conveyor belts and giant cube systems existed. A robot that walks up to an ordinary rack and grabs a shoe box did not.
A fleet of dozens of TORU robots working beside human pickers is what turned a research idea into a product.
Frederik Brantner became chief executive and Lukas Zanger chief operating officer. Moritz Tenorth later joined as chief technology officer. They built TORU, a tall, narrow mobile robot that stores and retrieves cartons. It was slow, expensive work. Hardware does not iterate like software; every mistake meant metal.
The early backers were an unusual mix of the people who would use the machine and the people who would fund it: the High-Tech Gruenderfonds, Siemens, the logistics group FIEGE, which put money in during 2017, and the fashion retailer Zalando, whose warehouses became the showcase. A fleet of dozens of TORU robots working beside human pickers is what turned a research idea into a product.
What the company needed next was a patient owner. In 2020 the forklift maker Jungheinrich took a stake; in 2022 it raised that to 21.7 percent. Then, in August 2023, it bought everything. The price was never disclosed, though one market data site reported roughly €20 million for the last 74.5 percent, a number that should be treated cautiously.
The founders did not disappear. Brantner and Zanger stayed on, and the company now sits inside one of Europe's biggest intralogistics groups, with about 130 people in its robotics team. The deal gave Jungheinrich, in its own words, one of the largest mobile robotics development teams on the continent.
There is a lesson in the order of events. Magazino did not sell because it failed; it sold because hardware startups run out of runway before the market arrives. A strategic investor who first buys a minority, learns the technology and then takes the rest is a path a deep-tech founder can plan for, rather than fall into.
It also shows what staying costs. One co-founder left in the middle of the climb, and the two who remained traded independence for the chance to see the robot reach more warehouses. Whether that was the right trade is a question only they can answer. The robots, at least, are still picking.