Dexterity exits stealth with $56.2M raised for its collaborative warehouse robots

Dexterity emerged from stealth this week to announce its full-stack solution aimed at creating collaborative robotics systems. The hardware-software system is designed for a variety of different tasks, including bin picking and box packing, targeted at warehouse fulfillment and logistics needs.

The Bay Area-based startup has already built up significant support from the investment world, with $56.2 million raised to date, from a long list of backers, including Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Obvious Ventures, Pacific West Bank, B37 Ventures, Presidio (Sumitomo) Ventures, Blackhorn Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures and Stanford StartX.

The company was founded back in 2017 as an extension of CEO Samir Menon’s Stanford thesis, described by Dexterity thusly, “Menon worked on a control theory framework to describe how the human brain controls and coordinates the body, which serves as a model to distill human skill into mathematical programs that control robots in a graceful human-like manner.”

Part of the company’s appeal appears to be the versatility of the robotics, which are designed to work alongside their human counterparts and operate collaboratively. Among the early adopters for the system are an unnamed “global food manufacturer,” “a worldwide package delivery provider” and Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries.

Dexterity says it’s also seen a boost from the push for essential services during the COVID-19 pandemic, like so many others in the robotics and automation fields, stating that its systems have been involved with the shipping of “half a million units of packaged food.”

Source: TechCrunch, Brian Heater, July 22, 2020

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SVT Robotics Secures $3.5M in Seed Funding

SVT Robotics, a Norfolk, Va.-based provider of a software platform that accelerates and simplifies deployment of industrial robotics, completed a $3.5m seed funding round.

The round was led by Cowboy Ventures with participation from Dynamo Ventures, Schematic Ventures, Ludlow Ventures, and NRV.

The company intends to use the funds to scale up the product and customer success teams and expand its offering.

Co-founded by Michael Howes and A.K. Schultz, SVT Robotics provides a robotic Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) that enables companies to connect their enterprise systems to any robot or automation. The company is now expanding its product feature set to support this customer growth and market demand.

Source. FinSMEs, May 5, 2020

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Covariant Raises $40M in Series B Funding

Covariant, a Berkeley, CA-based developer of artificial intelligence for robotics, raised $40m in Series B funding.

The round, which brought total funding raised to date to $67m, was led by Index Ventures and Radical Ventures with participation from Amplify Partners, etc. In conjunction with the funding, Mike Volpi, partner at Index Ventures, will be joining Covariant’s board.

The company will use the funds to expand its research, engineering and commercial teams, add partnerships, and launch AI Robotics to new industries.

Founded in 2017 by Pieter Abbeel, president, chief scientist officer and Peter Chen, CEO, Covariant is building the Covariant Brain, a universal AI to give robots the ability to see, reason and act on the world around them. In 2020, the company launched from stealth and later announced partnerships with ABB and Knapp.

Source. FinSMEs, May 7, 2020

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AMP Robotics raises $16 million to sort recyclable materials autonomously

AMP Robotics, a Denver, Colorado-based startup creating robotic systems that sort recyclable material, this morning announced that it has closed a $16 million series A funding round led by Sequoia Capital. BV, Closed Loop Partners, Congruent Ventures, and Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (an infrastructure firm spun out of Sidewalk Labs and backed by Alphabet and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan) also participated in the round, which brings AMP Robotics’ total raised to nearly $20 million following a seed round totaling $3.5 million.

The news comes just over a month after AMP Robotics installed 14 of its AI-guided robots at Single Stream Recyclers in Florida — the single largest global deployment in the recycling industry, the company claims — following deployments at facilities in California, Colorado, Indiana, Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin, and elsewhere in the U.S. CEO Matanya Horowitz said the newfound capital will bolster AMP Robotics’ operations in the nearly $12.26 billion waste sorting robotics market and drive product research and development.

"Our new partners at Sequoia have a history of building category-defining businesses, and we are deeply excited to be executing on this vision with their experience, along with our existing world-class consortium of investors,” said Horowitz, who founded AMP Robotics in 2015. “We are perfectly positioned to expand the scope of our technology and the geographies where we do business, furthering our mission to change the fundamental economics of recycling and help make the circular economy possible.”

AMP Robotics asserts its platform delivers higher and more consistent pick rates than typical manual processes and that it offers holistic monitoring of material streams without requiring retrofitting. It’s modular in design, enabling facilities mangers to adapt it to existing workflows, and it’s tailored to individual brands and SKUs of recyclable objects. To this end, AMP Robotics’ products can process not only metals, batteries, capacitors, plastics, PCBs, wires, cartons, cardboard, cups, aluminum, and thin film, but also materials made of metal, mixed wood, asphalt, bricks, concrete, and mixed plastics.

AMP Cortex, AMP Robotics’ robotics control system, leverages a combination of AI algorithms and physical robots to orchestrate sorting, picking, and placing tasks. A three-armed picker machine with an adaptable frame area and height sits over a conveyor belt, held in place by a moveable steel frame. It’s fed data from AMP Neuron, which uses computer vision to distinguish visual features and self-improves by processing “millions” of images in the cloud across AMP Robotics’ network, such that it’s able to more accurately sort objects and learn new classes of materials while adapting to packaging design and lighting changes.

All that data feeds into AMP Insights, an online visualization tool that monitors material stream activity and performance. Real-time notifications sent via text and email keep managers abreast of goings-on, including potential equipment issues and hazards. And AMP Insights tracks key commodities to determine things like material composition per bale, known value created or lost on residual lines, and per-hauling load.

“We are excited to partner with AMP because their technology is changing the economics of the recycling industry,” said Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, who plans to join the company’s board of directors. “Over the last few years, the industry has had their margins squeezed by labor shortages and low commodity prices. The end result is an industry proactively searching for cost-saving alternatives and added opportunities to increase revenue by capturing more high-value recyclables, and AMP is emerging as the leading solution.”

Source. Venture Beat, Kyle Wiggers, November 14, 2019

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Boston-based DataRobot raises $206M Series E to bring AI to enterprise

Artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly large role in enterprise software, and Boston’s DataRobot has been helping companies build, manage and deploy machine learning models for some time now. Today, the company announced a $206 million Series E investment led by Sapphire Ventures.

Other participants in this round included new investors Tiger Global Management, World Innovation Lab, Alliance Bernstein PCI and EDBI, along with existing investors DFJ Growth, Geodesic Capital, Intel Capital, Sands Capital, NEA and Meritech.

Today’s investment brings the total raised to $431 million, according to the company. It has a pre-money valuation of $1 billion, according to PitchBook. DataRobot would not confirm this number.

The company has been catching the attention of these investors by offering a machine learning platform aimed at analysts, developers and data scientists to help build predictive models much more quickly than it typically takes using traditional methodologies. Once built, the company provides a way to deliver the model in the form of an API, simplifying deployment.

The late-stage startup plans to use the money to continue building out its product line, while looking for acquisition opportunities where it makes sense. The company also announced the availability of a new product today, DataRobot MLOps, a tool to manage, monitor and deploy machine learning models across a large organization.

The company, which was founded in 2012, claims it has had triple-digit recurring revenue growth dating back to 2015, as well as one billion models built on the platform to date. Customers contributing to that number include a broad range of companies, such as Humana, United Airlines, Harvard Business School and Deloitte.

Source. TechCrunch, Ron Miller, Septembet 16, 2019

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electroNeek Robotics Raises $500k in Pre-Seed Funding

electroNeek Robotics, a New York-based startup that automates office workers routine, raised $500k in pre-seed funding.

Backers included:

– Softline Venture Partners,

– I2BF Global Ventures,

– YellowRockets.vс,

along with existing angel investors.

In the end of 2018, the company raised first external financing to release a software product that automates repetitive user tasks in enterprise applications and systems on the level of Graphic User Interface and cloud connectors. Emerged from the family of technologies known as Robotic Process Automation and Cloud Orchestration, electroNeek automates any work that an employee can create instructions for.

electroNeek can extract and interpret information from business documents (e.g. invoices or purchase orders), Desktop and SaaS applications (e.g. Salesforce), process it, fill out a form or create a custom report, or just move the data between any desktop or cloud app, following business instructions.

Led by Sergey Yudovskiy, CEO, the company targets mid-market and small businesses that have many repetitive tasks and constantly changing IT infrastructure and processes.

Today, it has more than 80 implementation partners globally (including PwC).

Source. FinSMEs, Staff, June 14, 2019

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Simpo raises $4.5M seed to help drive software adoption

By Ron Miller

Simpo is a startup with a simple idea. It wants to help product managers at large companies get software into the hands of its employee users faster. Today, the company announced a $4.5 million seed investment.

The round was led by Redpoint Ventures with participation from Janvest, UpWest, Seedcamp, Elad Gil and other unnamed investors.

The idea behind Simpo is to offer a no-code platform for distributing software and educating end users on how to use it. Any friction in this process can reduce adoption, and Simpo created a platform for product managers without a lot of technical know-how to set up software distribution workflows with the goal of driving greater adoption.

There is an element of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) here too, by letting product managers build logical workflows, and then as users interact with the software, it can learn and offer next steps to help further drive usage. This approach really attracted Satish Dharmaraj, managing partner at lead investor Redpoint Ventures.

“Simpo is really exciting [to me] because it has solved so much of the software adoption problem in a sophisticated, yet incredibly simple way. Robotic process automation is a transformative force, and now product managers are able to harness its power for the first time. As software continues to dominate the enterprise, Simpo is a critical piece in driving adoption and informing how and what products will be built,” Dharmaraj said in a statement.

The company counts Walmart, DuPont and Jet as customers.

Source. TechCrunch, Ron Miller, June 11, 2019

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AI-powered Damon Motorcycles raises $2.5 million Seed round

By Isabelle Kirkwood

Vancouver-based Damon Motorcycles, a company that creates safety innovations for motorcycles using sensor fusion, robotics, and AI technology, has raised a $2.5 million Seed round from Round 13 Capital, Techstars, Extreme Venture Partners, and Pallasite Ventures.

There were 51 deaths related to motorcycle crashes in British Columbia alone in 2018, according to a recent B.C. Coroners Service report. Damon stated that it seeks to make motorcycles safer by using low-cost connectivity networks, sensors, and mobile computing. The company said with the new funds, it will be able to address the critical safety needs of motorcycle customers and manufacturers.

“We typically do not do Seed deals, but occasionally we come across a founder and a plan that we think can be a potential game changer and we felt strongly that Damon fit this definition,” said Bruce Croxon, managing partner at Round 13 Capital. “We were impressed with the company founder, the idea itself and the problem it’s solving, and we’re thrilled to be onboard.”

Unlike the traditional driver-assistance systems in cars, Damon’s Advanced Warning System for Motorcycles recognizes the ‘cageless’ conditions and vehicle dynamics of motorcycles that make riders vulnerable on the road. The company has developed forward, side, and rear detection algorithms that communicate to form a 360-degree birds’ eye view of what’s happening around the motorcycle.

Damon’s algorithms have to be tested over thousands of miles, both real and virtual, before a motorcycle can detect and anticipate accidents on all sides, in all environmental and traffic conditions, on a consistent basis. With cellular connectivity, possible collision scenarios are recorded, and the data is then sent automatically to a cloud platform where an AI-powered engine continually learns and creates new algorithms. Updates are returned to the bike’s processor and alert the rider to potential hazards on the road.

The company was founded by Jay Giraud and Dom Kwong in 2017, and its team consists of a group of former Intel, Harley-Davidson, Polaris, Nokia, and Mojio workers. It is a Creative Destruction Lab alumni and a Techstars Mobility company.

“We are focused on the forgotten category of 1.5 billion vulnerable road users, and to fulfill our vision, we put data-driven thinking at the epicentre of the company,” said Giraud. “We are building a radical riding experience where the joy and simplicity of riding is augmented by technology, and our goal is to usher in a world with no fatal accidents on Damonized [sic] vehicles by 2030.”

The company said motorcycle manufacturers are currently evaluating its technology for factory integration.

Source. Betakit, Isabelle Kirkwood,  June 4, 2019

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Locus Robotics Raises $26M in Series C Funding

Locus Robotics, a Wilmington, Mass.-based market leader in autonomous mobile robots (AMR) for fulfillment warehouses, raised $26M in Series C funding.

Backers included Zebra Ventures, the strategic investment arm of Zebra Technologies, and Scale Venture Partners.

The company, which has raised more than $66m in total funding since launch, will use the proceeds to scale production of its multi-bot solution for warehouse fulfillment, as well as expand its sales and marketing efforts, both in North America, and internationally.

Led by Rick Faulk, CEO, Locus Robotics provides a multi-robot solution that enables warehouse operators to achieve efficient fulfillment operations while simultaneously managing both labor costs and fluctuating order volume.

Customers include DHL, GEODIS, Port Logistics Group, Verst Logistics, Radial, and others.

In addition to Zebra Ventures’ financial investment, Zebra Technologies is working with Locus to integrate technologies to bring innovative solutions to market. Locus recently added an accessory power port to their autonomous mobile robot, the LocusBot, which features a Zebra printer integrated onto its robotic platform, and showcased a Zebra wireless handheld scanner integrated with Locus’s new putaway functionality.

Source. FinSMEs, Staff, April 22, 2019

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Avidbots raises $23.6 million in Series B funding led by True Ventures

Avidbots, a company that brings robots to everyday life to expand human potential, today announced it has raised $23.6 million in Series B funding led by returning investor True Ventures. Other returning investors include GGV Capital, SOSV, Real Ventures, and 500 Startups Canada. New investors include Next47, BDC Capital, and KCPL. To date, Avidbots has raised $36 million in venture capital financing.

Avidbots is a fast-growing company that designs and builds autonomous connected robots. Its first product is Neo, a robotic floor scrubber widely deployed in commercial locations around the world, including airports, warehouses, manufacturing sites, malls, and universities. Manufactured in Avidbots’ 40,000-square foot facility in Kitchener, Ontario, Neo is in use today in over a dozen countries, cleaning floors in locations such as Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, Toronto’s Eaton Centre mall, and Rochester Institute of Technology. To date, Neo has cleaned over half a billion square feet of floor space.

“With strong worldwide demand for our Neo industrial cleaning robot, Avidbots has been growing at a tremendous pace, and we’re excited to announce the financial support of world-class investors such as True Ventures, Next47, and GGV Capital as we enter into our next phase of expansion,” said Faizan Sheikh, CEO and co-founder of Avidbots. “With this new funding, we will accelerate investment in talent acquisition, engineering, marketing, and sales to bring our cutting-edge robots to more customers worldwide.”

Avidbots created Neo to solve a real-world problem: cleaning floors in large commercial spaces. Traditionally, a janitor must push a floor-scrubbing machine every night, taking hours to complete this tedious and back-breaking work. The job has high turnover, making it difficult for facilities to efficiently manage their cleaning operations. When Neo joins the maintenance crew, it frees up human coworkers to focus on higher-value tasks, such as cleaning bathrooms and common areas. Ground staff control Neo through an easy-to-use touch screen, while facilities managers can log into an intuitive web app called Command Center to access real-time and historical reporting and video streams—getting clear visibility into cleaning operations and outcomes.

“We invest in industrial automation and robotics companies that have thought deeply about which types of work are best suited for machines,” said Rohit Sharma, Partner at True Ventures. “Repetitive, tedious work like commercial floor cleaning is an effective area of initial focus and we’re thrilled to support Faizan and his team as they pioneer this space.”

While most robotic floor-cleaning machines are simply existing manual models retrofitted with hardware and software that allows them to travel a few pre-programmed routes, Avidbots Neo is the first purpose-built commercial robotic floor scrubber that uses AI to optimize performance. Neo does not just follow a set path, but instead continually learns from its environment to change its route on the fly—avoiding obstacles and adapting to new floor layouts. Neo has a vertically-integrated technology stack that incorporates proprietary software and a unique hardware design, as well as the most advanced 3D sensors and cameras. Connected to the cloud through WiFi and 4G, Neo includes 24x7 monitoring and automatically receives regular software updates to continuously gain new functionality. Neo is the only floor-cleaning robot that gets smarter and more effective over time.

About Avidbots

Avidbots designs and manufactures autonomous connected robots to expand human potential. Its first product is Neo, a robotic floor scrubber widely deployed in airports, warehouses, manufacturing sites, malls, universities, and other commercial spaces worldwide. With a rapidly-expanding customer base in over a dozen countries, Avidbots is a global leader in collaborative service robots. Founded in 2014 by robotics engineers from the University of Waterloo and headquartered in Kitchener, Ontario, Avidbots is backed by top global venture capital firms including True Ventures, Next47, GGV Capital, BDC, Felicis Ventures, Real Ventures, and Golden Ventures. For more information, visit https://www.avidbots.com

About True Ventures

Founded in 2005, True Ventures is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology startups. With more than $2 billion under management, True provides seed and Series A funding to the most talented entrepreneurs in today’s fastest growing markets. The firm maintains a strong community that supports founders and their teams, helping True companies achieve higher levels of success and impact. To date, True has helped more than 250 companies launch and scale their businesses, creating over 10,000 jobs worldwide. The firm was awarded 2018 Venture Firm of the Year by the National Venture Capital Association. To learn more, visit https://trueventures.com


Source. Company Press Release, March 21, 2019

Robotics process automation startup UiPath raising $400M in at more than $7B valuation

By Kate Clark

UiPath,  a robotics process automation platform targeting IT businesses, is raising more than $400 million in Series D funding from venture capital investors at a valuation north of $7 billion, sources have confirmed to TechCrunch following a report from Business Insider.

We’ve reached out to the company for comment.

UiPath, founded in 2005, has raised $409 million to date, meaning the new round of capital will double the total capital invested in the startup, as well as its valuation. Its $225 million Series C, raised just six months ago, valued the business at $3 billion, according to PitchBook. UiPath is backed by top-tier investors CapitalG and Sequoia Capital,  which co-led its Series C, as well as Accel, Credo Ventures  and Earlybird Venture Capital,  among others.

The latest funding round is being led by a public institutional investor.

UiPath develops automated software workflows meant to facilitate the tedious, everyday tasks within business operations. RPA is probably a misnomer. It’s not necessarily a robot in the way we think of it today. It’s more like a highly sophisticated macro recorder or workflow automation tool, letting a computer handle a series of highly repeatable activities in a common workflow, like accounts payable.

For example, the process could start by scanning a check, then use OCR to read the payer and the amount, add that information to an Excel spreadsheet and send an email to a human to confirm it has been done. Humans still have a role, especially in processing exceptions, but it provides a way to bring a level of automation to legacy systems, which might not otherwise benefit from more modern tooling.

The company began raising private capital in 2015 and has since experienced rapid growth of its valuation and annual recurring revenue (ARR). UiPath garnered a$1.1 billion valuation with its Series B in March 2018, more than doubled it with its Series C and is again seeing a 2x increase in value with this latest round. This is a result of its swelling ARR.

The company says it went from $1 million to $100 million in annual recurring revenue in less than two years. With its Series C, it counted 1,800 enterprise customers and was adding six new customers a day. Sources tell TechCrunch that UiPath did 180 million in ARR last year and is on track to do $450 million in ARR in 2019.

Source. Techcrunch. Kate Clark, March 21, 2019

SoftBank's next bet: $940M into autonomous delivery Nuro

By Kirsten Korosec

Nuro the autonomous delivery startup, has raised $940 million in financing from the SoftBank Vision Fund, a whopping amount that will be used to expand its delivery service, add new partners, hire employees and scale up its fleet of self-driving bots.

Nuro has raised more than $1 billion from partners, including SoftBank, Greylock Partners  and Gaorong Capital.

“We’ve spent the last two and a half years building an amazing team, launching our first unmanned service, working with incredible partners and creating technology to fundamentally improve our daily lives,” Nuro co-founder Dave Ferguson said in a statement. “This partnership gives us the opportunity to take the next step in realizing our vision for local commerce and the broad application of our technology.”

Nuro’s focus has been developing a self-driving stack and combining it with a custom unmanned vehicle designed for last-mile delivery of local goods and services. The vehicle has two compartments that can fit up to six grocery bags each.

“Nuro’s world-class team has successfully scaled their self-driving technology out of the lab and into the streets,” Michael Ronen, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers said in a statement. “In just two years Dave, Jiajun and team have developed Nuro from a concept into a real business using robotics to connect retailers to customers.”

The company partnered in 2018 with Kroger  to pilot a delivery service in Arizona. The pilot, which initially used Toyota Prius vehicles, transitioned in December to the delivery bot. The autonomous vehicle called R1, is operating as a driverless service without a safety driver on board in the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale.

The autonomous delivery service might get all the attention. But Nuro’s decision to license its self-driving vehicle technology to Ike, an autonomous trucking startup, is just as notable.

Ike now has a copy of Nuro’s stack, which is worth billions, based on this latest round. Nuro also has a minority stake in Ike.

Ike, which announced its own $52 million funding round last week, doesn’t have an ongoing technical connection with Nuro. Ike co-founder and CEO Alden Woodrow has explained to TechCrunch before that this copy was a “hard fork.”

This licensing deal shows that Nuro’s leadership team has an appetite for diversifying the business.

Source. Tech Crunch, Kirsten Korosec, February 11, 2019