InvestmentHive
Why we backed the silicon brain letting industry run itself
01Why Hive, and why now?
A skilled machine-hour (a loader, a forklift, a crane) has only become harder to get a hold of and grown more expensive, and operators are scarce and often working where people shouldn’t have to.
Physical work doesn’t scale the way software does, and that same constraint runs through construction, ports, quarries, warehouses and logistics alike. Hive’s ambition is to change that across all of them: retrofit a “silicon brain” onto the machines that already exist and let them run on their own.
What convinced us is that this is no longer a lab story. Hive is already running machines on live sites across Scandinavia, with a long line of customers waiting to get started. If they win, physical labour becomes significantly more scalable, and the machines the world already runs become far more capable.
02Why Runway?
Physical AI on real industrial assets is the thesis Runway is built on, and once we saw it, our roots in heavy industry let us move quickly and with conviction. What we read wasn’t a polished demo but real commercial pull: signed contracts, OEM interest, and demand coming straight from operators.
And we could offer something back: credibility in heavy industry and direct lines to the customers and partners who decide whether autonomy actually gets deployed. We invested alongside SuperSeed, Veriten, Skyfall and Nysnø.
03From investment to deployment
The work starts immediately: introductions across our industrial network to the operators who can put Hive’s machines to work, and connections into the rest of our physical-AI portfolio, from humanoids to sensing.
Zoom out and the direction is clear. Physical labour is moving the way compute did, from something every company owns and staffs to something bought by the hour. Hive is our second investment out of Fund II and one of the most ambitious physical-AI companies to come out of Norway. A good marker of where industrial technology is heading.