NEURA and SECO Partner on Robot Compute Modules Built in Europe

NEURA Robotics and SECO announced a strategic partnership on September 7, 2026, under which the Italian embedded-computing company will design, engineer and manufacture electronic compute modules for NEURA’s cognitive robots, including the humanoid 4NE1. The companies’ joint announcement, datelined Metzingen, Germany, and Arezzo, Italy, frames the collaboration as an effort to industrialize and scale Physical AI from Europe.

Compute Modules for Cognitive Robots

The modules integrate Qualcomm Dragonwing processors from Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., and form part of NEURA’s broader distributed compute architecture. The collaboration brings together three complementary capabilities: NEURA’s Physical AI and robotics architecture, which builds on Qualcomm Technologies’ edge computing platforms, and SECO’s embedded engineering and industrial manufacturing expertise.

NEURA’s architecture divides into what it calls Brain + Nervous System inside the machine. Under the company’s Smart Limbs concept, sensing and compute are distributed throughout the robot rather than centralized, placing intelligence closer to the joints, sensors and physical contact points where real-time decisions occur. The announcement states that this edge responsiveness is what allows the robots to work safely alongside people, and that Dragonwing Robotics processors support the on-device AI performance, power efficiency and low-latency control the decentralized approach requires. SECO’s role is to engineer and industrialize the corresponding compute modules for scalable production.

NEURA describes Physical AI as resting on three fundamental technology layers: sensing, compute and cloud infrastructure. Under the partnership, the compute hardware SECO manufactures for NEURA’s robots will be developed and produced in Europe, which the companies describe as adding a link to a resilient European supply chain.

The 4NE1 humanoid, one of the platforms set to carry the modules, is listed on NEURA’s product page with a height of 180 centimeters, a weight of 80 kilograms, a top speed of 5 kilometers per hour and payloads between 10 and 100 kilograms, with full-body sensing, exchangeable forearms and versions on wheels for industrial floors.

Semiconductor Focus and a Planned Italian Training Hub

Beyond the compute modules, the partnership targets semiconductor and electronics manufacturing. NEURA and SECO plan to use real-world production data gathered as NEURA robots are deployed in industrial settings to develop new Physical AI automation solutions for that industry, with the stated objective of teaching machines increasingly complex production processes and turning that knowledge into scalable automation capabilities deployable across semiconductor manufacturing environments worldwide.

The companies also outlined next steps for the partnership: a NEURA Gym in Italy, which would mark NEURA’s first training hub in Southern Europe, and the joint collection of real-world production data. According to NEURA’s NEURA Gym page, the facilities are physical training sites where robots practice real tasks in authentic environments, generating training data from real physics, variability and constraints that the company says simulation alone cannot replicate.

SECO already works with Qualcomm Technologies as an ecosystem partner and has been building different tiers of compute platforms for industrial applications on Dragonwing processors. The announcement states that the design and development of compute modules for NEURA’s cognitive robots brings those key technologies together.

Extending the Qualcomm Collaboration

The partnership extends an earlier arrangement. On March 9, 2026, NEURA and Qualcomm Technologies announced a long-term strategic collaboration covering Brain + Nervous System reference architectures that pair high-level cognition with ultra-low-latency, real-time control, including the Dragonwing IQ10 Series processors and a planned standardized runtime for deploying AI workloads across robotic platforms. SECO said it is proud to work with NEURA on both the industrialization of its cognitive robotics platforms and the application of Physical AI to its own industrial environment, with CEO Max Mauri stating that combining the companies’ expertise with Qualcomm’s computing platforms can create solutions relevant far beyond a single factory or application.

“Physical AI will not be built by one company alone,” said David Reger, founder and CEO of NEURA Robotics. “It requires an ecosystem across sensing, compute, cloud and industrialization.”

Nakul Duggal, EVP and Group GM for Automotive, Industrial and Embedded IoT, and Robotics at Qualcomm Technologies, said the company was pleased to see SECO join the growing ecosystem and help accelerate the path to reliable, large-scale production.

NEURA Robotics was founded in 2019 and is headquartered in Metzingen, Germany, where it develops cognitive robots and the software, AI and data infrastructure to deploy them. SECO describes itself as a high-tech company delivering integrated edge AI infrastructure and physical AI systems, with customers across industrial automation, robotics, medical, defense, transportation, energy and vending.