David Reger got his first big robotics job by pretending. In 2011 a Swiss machinery maker called Mabi told him he could work on robots or on 3D printers. He picked robots. He had never worked with one, and he has admitted he pretended he had.
He taught himself at night, from YouTube videos.
Within a year of joining Mabi, his small team showed a large industrial robot arm at the Automatica fair in Munich.
The man who would one day run a company valued in the billions grew up near Rottweil, the eldest of eleven children. His father worked in a factory making auto parts, his mother stayed at home, and on Saturdays the boy went to the factory to clean machines. He skipped university and did a three-and-a-half-year apprenticeship as a mold maker. At 21 he moved to San Francisco and spent about a year and a half as a case manager for homeless people, then came home with a new appreciation for Germany's safety net.
Within a year of joining Mabi, his small team showed a large industrial robot arm at the Automatica fair in Munich. He stayed seven years. By 2018 he wanted to build machines that could learn new tasks and pass that knowledge to each other through a shared platform. The board told him, he says, that it was five or six years too early. He thought waiting would make him late.
So he left. He teamed up with Han's Robot, a Shenzhen maker of collaborative robots, and in March 2019 set up a German company, Han's Robot Germany. He hired about a dozen engineers and scientists, some from Mabi. The Chinese partner owned 70 percent. The company was renamed Neura in 2020.
In June 2023 Reger bought out Han's stake for 11 million dollars. A month later Neura raised 55 million. In January 2025 came a 120 million euro Series B, and in June 2026 an announced Series C of up to 1.4 billion dollars led by Tether, with Nvidia, Amazon, Qualcomm and Bosch also investing. People close to the deal put the valuation near 7 billion dollars. Forbes estimated his stake, close to 20 percent, at roughly 1.5 billion.
The company has not published revenue. Its last public filing, from 2022, showed a loss of nearly 7 million dollars, though it says orders exceed a billion.
The quiet lesson is in the pretending. Reger did not wait to feel qualified. He said yes, learned the thing at night, and kept saying yes until the thing was his.