Sereact, NVIDIA, Nebius, CEVA Logistics and Zalando have closed the training loop for Cortex, Sereact’s robot brain, the five companies announced in Berlin on October 21. The first deployment handles Zalando’s returns at selected CEVA Logistics fulfilment centres, where a mistake a robot makes on Monday can now return as a tested policy update within days — a cycle that previously took weeks of manual re-engineering.
Returns are among the hardest warehouse processes to automate. Each item arrives in whatever state the customer left it: refolded or crumpled, in its polybag or loose, with or without tags. A robot has to pick it, identify it, check its condition and sort it, while the assortment changes every season.
How The Closed Loop Runs
The loop runs as one workflow on one shared data layer. Episodes from the returns stations — video plus kinematics — land in Nebius object storage. NVIDIA Isaac Lab turns them into thousands of simulated variants, and NVIDIA Cosmos re-renders those across garment states, packaging, materials and lighting. The versioned dataset then post-trains Cortex on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs.
The new policy is scored on held-out variants against a threshold Sereact sets. A policy that passes goes to the stations for a real-world test. One that fails triggers targeted variants for the cases it missed, and the loop trains again. Until now, improving Cortex meant collecting episodes on site, retraining, testing on the robot and starting over — weeks per cycle, covering only cases a team could stage by hand.
An Agent Operates The Pipeline
An AI agent builds and runs the loop. NVIDIA’s Physical AI Data Factory skills are open, versioned instruction files that a coding agent reads directly, and Nebius adds Workbench skills for simulation, training, evaluation and the gate. The agent previews GPU cost before each run, launches the stages, checks the gate and, after a failed run, decides which cases to augment. Sereact engineers state the goal — the release gives “validate the policy for the autumn assortment” as an example — and approve any run above a set cost limit.
Each partner brings a defined layer. Sereact contributes Cortex, its vision-language-action model, plus the dual-arm returns stations and the real episodes they record. NVIDIA supplies Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab for simulation, Cosmos world models for re-rendering and the Data Factory skills. Nebius runs the stack through its open-source Physical AI Workbench and EU data centres, with RTX-class GPUs for simulation and Blackwell for training. CEVA hosts the stations in its fulfilment centres, and Zalando provides the use case its returns volume tests. The pipeline is available today as a Workbench reference architecture on Nebius AI Cloud for any robotics team, priced on compute and storage used. The launch extends the robotics platform work covered in NVIDIA’s expanded Isaac platform and sits in the wider field surveyed in What Are AI Agents?; Sereact has raised over $145 million to date, with Zalando among its backers.
Why It Matters
The returns loop matters because it attacks the bottleneck that keeps warehouse robots narrow: policies improve only as fast as engineers can stage failures, retrain and retest by hand. By feeding real failures straight into simulation and letting an agent run the retraining cycle, the partners claim the improvement loop compresses from weeks to days, and the same reference architecture is open to any robotics team on Nebius’s cloud rather than being a one-off Zalando installation. For NVIDIA, it is another production proof point for the Isaac and Cosmos stack outside its own reference designs — the same stack it expanded at GTC Berlin this week, including the RFD4-Proteina protein-design release.
Background
Sereact, founded in 2021 and headquartered in Stuttgart, builds physical AI for warehouses and manufacturing; its Cortex brain runs single-arm picking cells, dual-arm returns stations and humanoid robots for customers including IKEA, DHL and BMW. CEVA Logistics, part of the CMA CGM Group, announced on October 7 that Sereact’s dual-arm systems had entered live operations at its Greven and Świebodzin sites for Zalando, which connects 62 million active customers with more than 7,000 brands across 29 markets. Nebius, the Amsterdam-headquartered AI cloud company, launched its Physical AI Living Lab with NVIDIA in June 2026.
Source: GlobeNewswire
0 Comments