Elvio Robotics is building the automation infrastructure for hospitals: a turnkey system that brings together robots, software, building infrastructure, and operational processes to automate workflows in complex, regulated healthcare environments.
Founded in Munich in 2026, the company is tackling one of the most pressing challenges facing healthcare systems today: severe workforce shortages. Hospitals are under growing pressure to maintain high-quality patient care while critical staff spend significant time on repetitive, non-clinical tasks.
Elvio Robotics addresses this with a system-level approach to automation. Its platform enables hospitals to deploy and operate robots across multiple workflows and manufacturers through a unified infrastructure layer. Use cases range from laboratory sample and medication transport to cleaning, large-container logistics, and patient guidance, with autonomous patient transport among the next areas of expansion.
In April 2026, Elvio Robotics closed a €3 million pre-seed round backed by four institutional investors and more than 20 angel investors across four continents. Rather than limiting the number of angels to keep its cap table simple, the company pooled them into a single SPV through Roundtable.
The result: the operational simplicity of a clean cap table combined with the strategic value of a broad, highly engaged investor network.
Marco Brizzolara, Co-Founder and CEO of Elvio Robotics, spoke with us about the round, the company’s approach to hospital automation, and why founders may be leaving significant strategic value on the table when they limit their angel investor base purely for administrative reasons.
Key takeaways:
- Elvio Robotics is building the infrastructure layer for hospital automation. Rather than deploying individual robots in isolation, the company combines software, hardware integration, building infrastructure, and operational expertise into one system designed to automate multiple workflows at scale. That vision helped Elvio Robotics raise a €3 million pre-seed round from four institutional investors and more than 20 angels across Europe, the US, Latin America, and Asia.
- An SPV made a broad angel base operationally manageable. By grouping more than 20 angel investors into a single vehicle through Roundtable, Elvio Robotics was able to maintain a clean cap table while keeping administrative complexity low. Roundtable supported the process from KYC and KYB through investor onboarding, reporting, and shareholder administration.
- The value of the angel network goes far beyond capital. Many of Elvio Robotics’ angels are experienced founders and operators. Since investing, they have helped open doors to hospitals and commercial partners, supported recruiting, and shared expertise relevant to building and scaling.
For Elvio Robotics, the SPV structure made it possible to avoid what is often seen as a trade-off in early-stage fundraising: choosing between a simple cap table and a large, strategically valuable investor network.
Roundtable: Could you introduce yourself to our readers and tell us what led you to create Elvio Robotics?
Marco Brizzolara: I’m German-Italian and grew up in Germany, where I completed my bachelor’s degree, before spending much of the following eight years abroad, studying and working across Italy, India, China, and the UK.
During my time in China, I joined Horizon Robotics early on the business side. The company was among the pioneers in developing dedicated AI chips for autonomous driving and is now publicly listed and one of the leading players in the Chinese market. From there, I was recruited by ByteDance, where I worked from 2020 to 2022 at the company’s headquarters in Beijing, including in the CEO’s office. I later moved with ByteDance to London before joining McKinsey, where I worked primarily on technology and growth topics.
Throughout that time, I knew I eventually wanted to build a company myself. I deliberately sought broad operating experience across different functions and learned a great deal from the entrepreneurs and technology companies around me in China.
What ultimately led to Elvio was seeing the contrast between how advanced robotics had become in China and how little automation had reached European hospitals.
Healthcare is one of the sectors most affected by demographic change and workforce shortages, yet there is still no established system-level provider focused on bringing automation into hospitals at scale. And when I say automation, I don’t mean simply supplying robots. It requires the full stack: software, hardware integration, hospital infrastructure, user interfaces, process expertise, cybersecurity, data protection, and ongoing operations.
I also had firsthand exposure to hospital operations early on. When I was younger, I spent six weeks working across different parts of a hospital, from surgery and administration to the CEO’s office. That gave me an early understanding of how complex these organizations are and how many essential processes still depend on people performing repetitive, non-clinical tasks.
Roundtable: How did Elvio Robotics come together?
Marco Brizzolara: Johannes Drexler, our co-founder and CTO, and I started discussing the idea at the beginning of 2026, and things moved very quickly from there.
Before we even had a legal entity, we were already speaking with one of Germany’s largest municipal hospitals. Their message was very clear: the opportunity for automation was huge, but the solutions available on the market were not yet good enough. That was an important validation for us.
We also had early support from experienced entrepreneurs in the German healthcare industry, which helped us refine the model and build the right network.
We raised our pre-seed round in April, received several term sheets, and the capital came in shortly afterwards. Since then, our focus has been on building the technology and deploying it in hospitals.
Roundtable: What does the healthcare automation sector currently look like in Germany?
Marco Brizzolara: In Europe, a large part of the market still consists of resellers: companies buy robots from manufacturers and sell or deploy them locally. That can work well in relatively simple environments, such as a retail store operating one or two robots.
Hospitals are fundamentally different.
They are among the most complex buildings in any city. Robots need to interact with elevators, doors, restricted areas, different floors, and changing environments. On top of that, hospitals have strict requirements around safety, cybersecurity, data protection, reliability, and operational continuity.
Hospitals cannot reasonably be expected to manage all of that complexity themselves. They are healthcare providers, not robotics companies. At the same time, a traditional reseller or integrator is rarely set up to solve the entire problem either.
Our model is therefore much closer to an infrastructure platform. We work with hospitals to understand which processes can be automated, prepare and integrate the necessary infrastructure, deploy the right robotic systems, connect them to existing workflows, and operate everything through a unified software layer.
Very few companies are tackling hospital automation at this system level, and for good reason: it requires patience, significant capital, highly specialized talent, and deep expertise across robotics, software, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and hospital operations.
Today, most hospitals still operate no robots at all. Those that do often have isolated solutions, such as a single cleaning robot, that struggle to deliver reliably in daily operations because they are not fully integrated into the building, the hospital’s processes, or the wider technology infrastructure.
That is exactly the problem Elvio Robotics is solving: not simply deploying individual robots, but building the system that makes automation work reliably and at scale.
Roundtable: What use cases are you currently focusing on?
Marco Brizzolara: Cleaning is often the easiest entry point for hospitals, but a major focus for us is internal logistics, including medication and laboratory sample transport.
Large hospitals can have teams of people spending much of their day moving samples, medication, supplies, or other items between departments. At the same time, recruiting and retaining staff for these roles is becoming increasingly difficult.
We recently met with the CIO of one of Munich’s largest municipal hospitals. One of the challenges they described was very straightforward: blood samples need to move through the hospital, but there are not always enough people available to transport them. In some cases, doctors or nurses end up doing it themselves. That is expensive, inefficient, and takes highly trained clinical staff away from patient care.
Another major area is container logistics: moving large quantities of food, laundry, waste, sterile supplies, and other goods throughout the hospital. Some of these containers weigh hundreds of kilograms, and in large hospitals, teams are dedicated to these transport processes.
We are also developing autonomous patient transport, including wheelchair-based transport. Hospitals face significant operational friction when patients need to move between wards, diagnostics, operating rooms, and other departments and no staff member is immediately available to accompany them.
Beyond these use cases, we will continue integrating additional robot types and automating new workflows. In many ways, we are developing this category together with our hospital partners.
Roundtable: Switching gears, could you tell me more about Elvio Robotics’ recent funding round and the role angel investors played in it?
Marco Brizzolara: We raised €3 million from four institutional investors and more than 20 business angels.
People sometimes tell us we’re crazy for bringing that many angels into the round, but we’re genuinely very happy we did it. We’re in regular contact with many of them, and they are much more than sources of capital. They are supporters, advisors, and, in many cases, friends of the company.
What we are building also has a strong societal dimension. If healthcare infrastructure increasingly struggles because of workforce shortages, software alone will not solve that problem. We need to automate parts of the physical world as well.
That mission resonates with people. Some angels may invest €5,000 or €10,000, but their value to the company can go far beyond the cheque. They introduce us to hospitals, potential partners, future employees, media and other investors. Many have built companies themselves and can share extremely valuable operating experience.
Most of our angels are based in Germany, but we also have investors from the US, Latin America, Asia, and Switzerland.
Roundtable: What was Roundtable’s role in this funding round?
Marco Brizzolara: We used Roundtable to pool our angel investors into a single SPV.
With more than 20 angels, that was not simply a matter of convenience; it was essential. Having all of those investors individually on the cap table would have created significant complexity around shareholder votes, legal processes, notary appointments, and future financing rounds.
The Roundtable team was extremely responsive throughout the process. We were in constant contact through a WhatsApp group, which I personally much prefer to email for something this operationally intensive.
They helped us navigate a process that is not straightforward, particularly with a large number of participants and several international investors. When you are dealing with fundraising closings, shareholder approvals, and notary processes, responsiveness matters enormously. Delays can have real consequences.
Overall, the team did a fantastic job.
Roundtable: How was your experience with the platform itself?
Marco Brizzolara: Very intuitive.
I didn’t need any onboarding to understand how to use it, and from what I could tell, the same was true for our investors. I don’t remember a single investor asking me how the platform worked.
That is exactly what you want from infrastructure like this: it should remove complexity rather than create another layer of it.
Roundtable: For you, what were the main operational benefits of using Roundtable?
Marco Brizzolara: The biggest benefit was that we barely had to manage the administrative process ourselves.
Roundtable handled the legal documentation, KYC and KYB processes, investor onboarding, and progress tracking. I could see the status of every investor in real time and received reminders when something needed to move forward.
We have also since completed a shareholder vote through the platform. Because Roundtable could act on behalf of the pooled investors, the process was dramatically simpler than coordinating individually with more than 20 shareholders.
For a founder, that matters enormously. Every hour spent chasing signatures or managing administrative processes is an hour you are not spending on customers, hiring, or product.
Roundtable: How would you evaluate the savings, either in terms of cost or time?
Marco Brizzolara: The biggest saving was definitely time.
Doing all of this manually would likely have taken weeks, and the probability of making mistakes would have been much higher. KYC, KYB, legal documentation, and international investors are not things you want to improvise.
Without infrastructure like this, many founders effectively end up limiting themselves to two or three angels simply because adding more becomes operationally painful.
We deliberately wanted to build a broad, international community of supporters around Elvio. Being able to pool those investors into a single SPV gave us the strategic benefits of having that network without creating unnecessary complexity on the cap table.
Roundtable: Would you use Roundtable again for a future round?
Marco Brizzolara: Definitely.
Unless the structure of a future financing were fundamentally different, I would absolutely use a platform like Roundtable again.
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