Why Zürich

By microagi leadership — May 7, 2026

We're opening our Global Robotics Research Headquarters on Bahnhofstrasse 63 in Zürich.

Spoiler: it's time to deploy robots.

Eight months ago, microagi was five people in a Munich hacker house. Today we operate in 15+ countries, across multiple offices, on a trajectory that has surprised even us. Zürich now becomes the gravitational center of our global research programs. Choosing it over San Francisco was not an easy decision. It is one we are making with full conviction.

To explain why, it helps to explain Zürich.

A city built for the long arc

Zürich is older than most countries. Around the dawn of the Common Era, the Romans established a small customs post called Turicum on the banks of the Limmat, a toll station whose job was to extract value from the flow of goods through one of Europe's natural corridors. From the very beginning, this place was about commerce, infrastructure, and standing in the right spot on the map.

In 1218, Zürich became a free imperial city, accountable to no feudal lord. It governed itself through guilds: distributed, accountable, run by craftsmen and merchants. That was the institutional DNA that would later define Switzerland. Three centuries later, Huldrych Zwingli launched the Swiss Reformation from the pulpit of the Grossmünster, helping rewire the religious and political order of half of Europe from a church two minutes' walk from where our office now stands.

The 19th century turned Zürich into something rarer still: a city that industrialized without losing itself. Alfred Escher, arguably the most consequential Swiss of his century, pushed through the Gotthard rail tunnel, founded what would become Credit Suisse, and in 1855 helped charter the Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule, today known as ETH Zürich. Escher's thesis was simple. A small landlocked country cannot compete on raw resources, so it has to compete on engineering. He was right.

By the early 20th century, Einstein was a student then a professor at ETH. Pauli taught here. Schrödinger passed through. Down a narrow lane in the Niederdorf, Hugo Ball opened Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 and accidentally invented Dadaism. A few doors away on Spiegelgasse, Lenin was plotting a different kind of revolution. Carl Jung was running his clinic across the lake. The city has, again and again, been the place where one era ends and the next begins.

The robotics inheritance

In 1956, IBM opened its Zürich Research Laboratory in Rüschlikon. That lab won two Nobel Prizes in two consecutive years: Binnig and Rohrer for the scanning tunneling microscope in 1986, and Bednorz and Müller for high-temperature superconductivity in 1987. STM gave humanity its first instrument to image and manipulate matter at the atomic level, and the entire nanotechnology stack rests on it. High-T_c superconductivity rewrote a chapter of condensed matter physics. Two Nobels, two years, one lab, one suburb of Zürich.

ETH itself has produced more than twenty Nobel laureates and is consistently ranked among the top engineering universities in the world. The more interesting fact for our work, though, is the density of its robotics output. The Robotic Systems Lab, Marco Hutter's group, gave the world ANYmal, the legged platform that has redefined what quadruped robots can do in industrial inspection and unstructured terrain. The Autonomous Systems Lab under Roland Siegwart seeded an entire generation of mobile robotics researchers and companies. Davide Scaramuzza's group at the University of Zürich has done foundational work on event-camera perception and high-speed autonomous flight, including drones that out-fly humans in racing conditions. The Computer Vision and Geometry Lab under Marc Pollefeys shaped large parts of the SLAM and 3D-reconstruction stack that runs inside modern AR.

Zürich is also a research-industry hybrid environment that does not exist elsewhere at this scale. Google's Zürich engineering center is its largest outside the United States. NVIDIA, Disney Research, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft all run substantive ML and perception teams here. ABB, one of the most important industrial-automation companies on earth, is headquartered in the city itself. Schindler's vertical-mobility robotics work happens in Ebikon, an hour south. Bühler automates a non-trivial share of the world's food production from Uzwil, an hour east. The precision-mechanics tradition that produced Swiss horology three centuries ago is the same supply chain we now use to spec harmonic drives, gearboxes, and force sensors.

What microagi does, and why this place

microagi builds physical AI. We design and ship the systems that let robots perceive, reason, and act in the messy continuous real world, not the demo world. Our research and engineering spans foundation models for embodied agents, sim-to-real pipelines, whole-body control, and the deployment infrastructure that turns one working prototype into a fleet that earns its keep on a factory floor, in a warehouse, in a hospital, on a farm. The next decade of AI value will be created where bits meet atoms, and the companies that arrive first with reliable hardware-software stacks will define the category.

Three things made Zürich the right home for the heart of that thesis.

One. Zürich has the highest density of robotics talent in the world. ETH, EPFL (under three hours away by direct train), the University of Zürich, IBM Research, the frontier-lab presence, and the operating arms of nearly every major US tech company combine to create a hiring environment that simply does not exist in any other 30-square-kilometer patch of the planet. Add to that the city's quality of life, which is clean, safe, walkable, and beautifully boring in the ways that matter for deep work, and we can attract the very best people from anywhere in the world.

Two. microagi is global, but European in identity. We do not want Europe to be late again. Europe was late to consumer internet. Europe was late to cloud. Europe was late to the foundation-model wave. But Europe is not late to robotics, because the industrial base that physical AI sits on top of has been here for a century and a half: precision mechanics, machine-tool culture, automation-grade engineering, regulatory seriousness around safety-critical systems. We intend to leverage it. The world is set to change completely, and we want to move with both speed and heart.

Three. Zürich sits at the geographic center of the most industrialized region on earth. Within a six-hour radius lie the German automotive belt, the Northern Italian manufacturing corridor, French aerospace, Benelux logistics, the Swiss machine-tool industry, and the Austrian industrial midlands. The demand signal for physical AI in this catchment is louder than anywhere else we operate. If you want to deploy robots into the real economy at scale, not as a demo but as a line item on a customer's P&L, you want to be where the customers already make things.

The crown

Turicum became Zürich. The toll station became a free city. The free city became the cradle of the Reformation. The market town became a polytechnic. The polytechnic produced Einstein. The lab in Rüschlikon produced two Nobels in two years. ETH produced world-class research, and the city around it produced the densest robotics ecosystem the world has ever seen.

We are stepping into that lineage with our eyes open. microagi is not opening an office in Zürich. We are anchoring our global robotics research program in the place that has, more reliably than any other, turned engineering rigor into the future. The Bahnhofstrasse address is intentional. So is the city.