The Carbon Robotics LaserWeeder smart implement can autonomously remove unwanted plants from the crop field. | Credit: Carbon Robotics

Carbon Robotics closed $30 million in Series C financing from new lead investor Sozo Ventures along with existing investors Anthos Capital, Fuse Venture Capital, Ignition Partners, Liquid2 and Voyager Capital. The funding will be used to expand sales regions in North America, optimize and scale manufacturing, develop new software and hardware products, and launch into international markets. This latest round of financing brings Carbon Robotics’ overall funding to $67 million.

“Carbon Robotics’ elegant use of AI, computer vision, robotics and lasers is the only solution that enables farmers to reduce their most expensive line item – weed control – without damaging plants or the soil,” said Rob Freelen, managing director of Sozo Ventures. “I am particularly impressed with the team’s fast pace of innovation to bring breakthrough products to market, boosting farmers’ profitability across conventional, organic and no-till practices.”

The LaserWeeder identifies weeds and targets them for elimination. The implement’s 30 high-powered CO2 lasers use thermal energy to destroy the meristem of the weed with millimeter accuracy, without damaging nearby crops or disturbing the soil.

“This financing round further supports our mission to provide cost-effective and efficient precision ag-tech tools to growers,” said Paul Mikesell, CEO and founder of Carbon Robotics. “Traditional weeding methods, including hand weeding and herbicides, are expensive, unreliable and damage soil health. The LaserWeeder uniquely addresses all of these challenges.”

To date, Carbon Robotics’ LaserWeeders have successfully eliminated more than 500 million weeds across 40 different crops. This year, the LaserWeeder will be delivered to farms across 17 U.S. states and three provinces in Canada. Most recently, Carbon Robotics expanded the features of the LaserWeeder with the industry’s first LaserThinning capability, targeting areas where vegetable crops are purposefully overseeded and then thinned for optimal crop spacing, growth and yield.

As part of the Series C financing, Rob Freelen with Sozo Ventures and Erik Benson with Voyager Capital will join the Carbon Robotics board of directors.

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Covariant raised another $75 million in its Series C funding round. The company announced the first part of its series C round, totaling $80 million, in 2021. It has now raised $222 million since its founding.

Radical Ventures and Index Ventures, both returning investors in the company, co-led the round. The most recent round also included participation from other returning investors Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Amplify partners, and new investors Gates Frontier Holdings, AIX Ventures and Northgate Capital.

Since its founding in 2017, Covariant has focused on developing the Covariant Brain, which the company called a Universal AI platform. Pre-trained on millions of picks from Covariant robots in warehouses around the world, the Covariant Brain enables robots to autonomously pick many SKUs. Covariant plans to use the funding to ensure its platform will allow retail and logistics providers to deploy robotic picking quickly.

“The leading companies have turned to AI Robotics to automate their most manual operations in order to decrease labor costs, increase throughput, and control profitability,” said Covariant CEO Peter Chen. “The past year for Covariant has been incredible with 6x growth in 2022 – and we are just getting started. This infusion of new capital allows us to scale even faster, ensuring more retailers can automate more parts of their fulfillment networks to remove manual bottlenecks, handle fluctuating demand, and better prepare for ever-changing business needs.”

Since its last funding announcement in 2021, the company has applied Covaraint Brian to a broad set of piece-picking and case-picking applications, including order sortation, item induction, good-to-person order picking, knitting and depalletization. With the platform, connected robots learn as a fleet, enabling operational improvements to automatically propagate across customers’ networks.

“Many companies are trying to break into the AI robotics space, but Covariant has been making significant progress for years now,” said Mike Volpi, partner at Index Ventures. “I’m confident that their team, which represents the best minds in AI, and their approach of deploying a unified AI platform are shaping the future of automation, and look forward to the additional progress they’ll make in the years ahead.”

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A screenshot of the Roboto platform.

Roboto AI, a company working to create tools to help robotics developers go from a prototype to a reliable production system, emerged from stealth with $4.8 million in Seed funding. Unusual Ventures led the round, which also included the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) and FUSE Ventures. Roboto AI is also partnering with researchers and professors at the ETH Zürich AI Center. 

Robotics companies oftentimes have to develop all of their infrastructure, anything from custom hardware to data infrastructure in-house. This could cost startups crucial time and money that could be spent getting their systems into the world. Roboto AI hopes to make development easier by providing a platform that supports robotics data. 

The company’s founders, Benji Barash (CEO) and Yves Albers-Schoenberg (CTO) have experience building this kind of infrastructure from their time at Amazon Robotics. The two used to spend entire days writing scripts to filter and transform sensor data so they could debug system failures, evaluate performance and create new algorithms. 

Roboto AI is working to create a data platform that allows users to easily search across modalities using natural language. The company currently has a free demo available that uses data from nuScenes, a large-scale, autonomous driving dataset used by engineers and researchers, for those interested in testing an early version of Roboto. With the sandbox, users can not only use natural language to search for the data they need, but they can also perform searches on graphical time-series signals. 

Roboto AI was founded in 2022 when it spun out of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. It is based in Seattle, Washington.

“Robotics is hard, but it shouldn’t be this hard. We want to catalyze progress in the robotics industry and see robots get to production faster by getting AI to do the dirty work for us,” the founders wrote in a blog. “We’re building Roboto to be an out-of-the-box solution to the data challenges engineers face daily and we’re excited to have the support of an incredible group of advisors and investors to make it happen. We’re building new AI-powered tools for anyone working with sensor or log data; think copilot for robotics.”

Roboto AI CTO Yves Albers-Schoenberg (left) and CEO Benji Barash. | Source: Roboto AI

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Companies offering unmanned aerial drones, usually coupled with drone-enabled data and analytics services, were particularly strong in February 2023, with firms receiving sizable mid- to late-stage funding rounds. These providers typically focus on surveying and inspection applications, with construction, agriculture, utilities and energy sectors as the target markets. Examples include Skydio ($230M Series E), Fulfil Solutions ($60M Series B), Garuda Aerospace ($22M Series A) and i-KINGTEC ($20M Series C). UK-based DRONAMICS landed $40M in Seed funding.

Table 1: February 2023 Robotics Funding and Investment

Companies located in the USA received the most rounds (14) and the most funding ($436M), dwarfing other countries (Figure 1). Investment into Chinese firms came in at a distant second (7 rounds for a total of $81M).

Figure 1: February 2023 Robotics Investment by Country

All funding types were well represented in February 2023 (Figure 2). Series E rounds accounted for the bulk of the funding amounts, buoyed by investments into drone data services providers Zeitview (formerly DroneBase) and Skydio, at $55M and $230M, respectively (Figure 3).

Figure 2: February 2023 Robotics Funding Amounts by Investment Type

Figure 3: February 2023 Robotics Funding Amounts by Investment Number and Amounts

Editor’s note: What defines robotics investments? The answer to this simple question is central in any attempt to quantify them with some degree of rigor. To make investment analyses consistent, repeatable, and valuable, it is critical to wring out as much subjectivity as possible during the evaluation process. This begins with a definition of terms and a description of assumptions.

Investors and investing
Investment should come from venture capital firms, corporate investment groups, angel investors, and other sources. Friends-and-family investments, government/non-governmental agency grants, and crowd-sourced funding are excluded.

Robotics and intelligent systems companies
Robotics companies must generate or expect to generate revenue from the production of robotics products (that sense, analyze, and act in the physical world), hardware or software subsystems and enabling technologies for robots, or services supporting robotics devices. For this analysis, autonomous vehicles (including technologies that support autonomous driving) and drones are considered robots, while 3D printers, CNC systems, and various types of “hard” automation are not.

Companies that are “robotic” in name only, or use the term “robot” to describe products and services that do not enable or support devices acting in the physical world, are excluded. For example, this includes “software robots” and robotic process automation. Many firms have multiple locations in different countries. Company locations given in the analysis are based on the publicly listed headquarters in legal documents, press releases, etc.

Verification
Funding information is collected from a number of public and private sources. These include press releases from corporations and investment groups, corporate briefings, market research firms, and association and industry publications. In addition, information comes from sessions at conferences and seminars, as well as during private interviews with industry representatives, investors, and others. Unverifiable investments are excluded and estimates are made where investment amounts are not provided or are unclear.

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Berkshire Grey produces ecommerce fulfillment automation systems that autonomously bring inventory to sorting and picking stations to assemble customer orders. | Credit: Berkshire Grey

Berkshire Grey, Inc. said that it has reached a final agreement to merge with SoftBank Group Corp. and its affiliate, which are both known as “SoftBank.” Under the terms of the agreement, SoftBank will buy all of the company’s outstanding capital stock that it does not already own for $1.40 per share. This is a cash deal worth about $375 million. SoftBank is a strategic investment holding company with investments in AI, smart robotics, IoT, telecommunications, internet services, and clean energy technology providers. In January 2020, Softbank participated in Berkshire Grey’s $263 million Series B financing round.

“After a thoughtful review of value creation opportunities available to Berkshire Grey, we are pleased to have reached this agreement with SoftBank, which we believe offers significant value to our stockholders,” said Tom Wagner, CEO of Berkshire Grey. “SoftBank is a great partner, and this merger will strengthen our ability to serve customers with our disruptive AI robotics technology as they seek to become more efficient in their operations and maintain a competitive edge.”

“As a long-time partner and investor in Berkshire Grey, we have a shared vision for robotics and automation,” said Vikas J. Parekh, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers. “Berkshire Grey is a pioneer in transformative, AI-enabled robotic technologies that address use cases in retail, eCommerce, grocery, 3PL, and package handling companies. We look forward to partnering with Berkshire Grey to accelerate their growth and deliver ongoing excellence for customers.”

The agreement, which was approved by Berkshire Grey’s board of directors unanimously, is worth about 24% more than the stock price at the end of trading on March 24, 2023, the last trading day before this announcement. The deal doesn’t depend on financing, and it’s expected to close in the third quarter of 2023, as long as the usual closing conditions are met, such as the approval of Berkshire Grey’s stockholders and approvals from government agencies.

As recently as Q2 2022, Berkshire Grey reported a loss of $29 million on $23.4 million in revenue.  The company has raised a total of $428 million to date (source: Crunchbase), and it went public in July 2021 in a SPAC deal.

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Breaking news today regarding the failure and collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, one of the oldest banks in Silicon Valley to be used by generations of technology startups. Steve Crowe and Mike Oitzman discuss the situation and the likely fallout and impact to robotics companies and the venture capital industry that supports them.

Also on the show today we (unrelatedly) interview Rylan Hamilton, cofounder and CEO of 6 River Systems. Mike had the opportunity to sit down with Rylan and talk about Rylan’s start in robotics with Kiva Systems and how he concepted and built 6 River Systems into a leading AMR manufacturer that’s now a major part of the Shopify family.

It’s a great interview about the importance of putting the customer first and starting with a problem, rather than a solution.

Links from today’s show:

• Silicon Valley Bank collapse live blog (Bloomberg)
• Plus One Robotics raises $50M Series C funding round
• John Deere acquires SparkAI’s human-in-the-loop tech
• Michael Kohen, founder and CEO of SparkAI on the podcast in episode 91
• 6 River Systems website

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Plus One Robotics, a provider of advanced AI vision software and solutions for robotic parcel handling, announced that it has raised $50 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners, with Partner Rory O’Driscoll joining the board of directors. Top Tier Capital Partners, Tyche Partners, ROBO Global Ventures, Translink, McRock, and Pritzker Group Venture Capital also participated in the round alongside existing investors which brings the company’s total funding to date to nearly $100 million.

This $50 million funding round comes less than 2 months after Plus One Robotics laid off about 10% of its staff.

With these new funds, Plus One expects to further increase its capacity and rapidly scale deployment, as well as expand its sales and marketing efforts in North America and internationally. This expansion builds on Plus One Robotics’ existing relationships with customers in the parcel post, logistics, and general merchandise industries, serving customers that include FedEx, MSC Industrial, and many more.

The labor problem

“The labor shortage is hitting the shipping industry hard, and parcel picking is an often overlooked yet essential part of the process,” said Scale Partner Rory O’Driscoll. “By automating the parcel handling piece, Plus One Robotics is rapidly modernizing an outdated system that’s no longer sustainable. It is stepping up and leading the way in a $128 billion market, with fundamentals that prove its value.”

E-commerce has grown to represent 19% of U.S. retail sales, with approximately 20 billion parcels delivered in the U.S. in 2021. Shipping growth is expected to rise by 25% over the next five years resulting in warehouses and distribution centers not having the workforce to keep up.

On the supply side, over 80% of warehouses are manual, and with the demands placed on shipping expected to grow, there will be over 1 million more jobs to fill by 2025 despite the shrinking of available labor sources – and costs are rising. Labor costs average $25 per hour and continue to increase. This creates a perfect storm threatening the supply chain and impeding future e-commerce growth.

“The growth of e-commerce has placed tremendous pressure on shipping responsiveness and scalability that has significantly exacerbated labor and capacity issues,” said Erik Nieves, CEO and co-founder of Plus One Robotics. “Automation is key, but keeping a human in the loop is essential to running a business 24/7 with greater speed and fewer errors. With the ongoing labor shortages, I believe we’ll see an increase in the adoption of Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) to lower capital expenditures and deploy automation on a subscription basis. This new funding will help us scale up and meet the need for these solutions.”

Key to Plus One Robotics’ effectiveness is its human-in-the-loop software. Employees, remote or on-premises, can supervise multiple robots from any location, speeding the robot’s ability to handle exceptions, and enabling 24/7 operations. Users benefit from improved sorting and picking throughput by >30% while decreasing operational costs.

Plus One said it has experienced nearly three times year-over-year growth from expanded business with existing customers and new deployments. Additionally, it has increased its adoption of the human-in-the-loop capability and RaaS offering among its parcel and post, third-party logistics (3PL), and general merchandise customers.

Plus One said its deployments perform over one million parcel picks each day in production.

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John Deere has acquired SparkAI, a New York-based startup that develops human-in-the-loop technology to help robots resolve edge cases in real-time. John Deere, which has developed autonomous tractors, was a SparkAI customer for a few years prior to the acquisition. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Willy Pell, VP of autonomy and new ventures at Blue River Technology, a company John Deere acquired in 2017 for $305 million, announced the acquisition on LinkedIn. Michael Kohen, founder and CEO of SparkAI, also posted about the acquisition on the social media platform. SparkAI was founded in 2020 and had raised $7.3 million before being scooped up by John Deere.

Kohen was a guest on The Robot Report Podcast in September 2022 and discussed the company’s human-in-the-loop technology at length.

Operating in a harsh environment like a farm with dust, rain and snow can occasionally make it difficult for machine learning models to consistently make confident & safe decisions. Here’s how the technology works with John Deere’s autonomous tractors:

In moments of low confidence, the autonomous tractor automatically calls SparkAI’s service, passing imagery and other metadata via REST API. The objective is to resolve difficult-to-discern details about the scene to support a real-time decision. SparkAI said it does this by combining two key components in real-time:

• 1. Cognitive input from multiple human mission specialists trained for the use case
• 2. Results from its proprietary software-based decision system

SparkAI returns this resolution to the autonomous tractor. The robot combines this resolution with its pre-existing knowledge of the world to decide on a safe and confident action. According to SparkAI, the entire round-trip process takes seconds and happens thousands of times per day, 24/7.

SparkAI’s role in the workflow is not to take over control and remotely pilot the autonomous tractor. SparkAI provides contextual cues that the autonomous tractor is sometimes missing in order to make confident decisions.

“Spark is going to expedite everything we do. We’re going to be able to ship products sooner and at higher quality with less work,” said Pell. “When we automate away the chunks of human intervention, we will do so with great datasets that characterize the problem across many situations and environments. And all the while we will be delivering value to the customers and learning more about our technology and the environment. And then we will apply that cognition to the next area of growth.”

This is the latest in a string of robotics-related moves by John Deere. In May 2022, it acquired numerous patents and other intellectual property from Light, which specializes in depth sensing and camera-based perception for autonomous vehicles. Financial terms of the deal are unknown. Light was founded in 2013 and raised $185.7 million before the acquisition.

In April 2022, John Deere formed a joint venture with GUSS Automation, a Kingsburg, California-based developer of semi-autonomous orchard and vineyard sprayers. Through the joint venture, Deere will help GUSS further collaborate with the Deere sales channel.

In August 2021, John Deere acquired Bear Flag Robotics for $250 million, a Calif.-based developer of autonomous driving technology for tractors. Founded in 2017, Bear Flag Robotics retrofits its autonomy stack onto existing tractors. It uses cameras, LiDAR and radar technology for redundant, 360-degree situational awareness on a farm.

And, of course, John Deere’s quest for autonomy was kicked off by its acquisition of Blue River Technology in 2017 for $305 million.

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Companies providing unmanned aerial drones and drone-enabling technologies, as well as drone services for search and rescue, public safety, industrial inspection, mapping and surveying, also attracted funding for Terra Drone, SwissDrones, SentinelSky and Nautical Wings, for example.

Robotics investments for December 2022 totaled $1.14B as a result of 55 investments. That represented a 7.7% increase over December 2021’s funding total of $1.06B (representing 65 investments).

Table 1: January 2023 Robotics Funding and Investment

As described in Figure 1, companies located in the USA received the most funding, both in terms of the number of rounds and the total funding amount for January 2023. The total funding for UK companies was sizable, buoyed by the investment into Oxbotica, a provider of a full-stack autonomy solution for autonomous vehicles.

Figure 1: January 2023 robotics investment by country

All funding types were represented for January 2023 investments (Figure 2), with C rounds accounting for the bulk of the funding amounts (Figure 3).

Figure 2: January 2023 robotics funding amounts by investment type

Figure 3: December 2022 robotics funding amounts by investment number and amounts

Editor’s note: What defines robotics investments? The answer to this simple question is central in any attempt to quantify them with some degree of rigor. To make investment analyses consistent, repeatable, and valuable, it is critical to wring out as much subjectivity as possible during the evaluation process. This begins with a definition of terms and a description of assumptions.

Investors and investing
Investment should come from venture capital firms, corporate investment groups, angel investors, and other sources. Friends-and-family investments, government/non-governmental agency grants, and crowd-sourced funding are excluded.

Robotics and intelligent systems companies
Robotics companies must generate or expect to generate revenue from the production of robotics products (that sense, analyze, and act in the physical world), hardware or software subsystems and enabling technologies for robots, or services supporting robotics devices. For this analysis, autonomous vehicles (including technologies that support autonomous driving) and drones are considered robots, while 3D printers, CNC systems, and various types of “hard” automation are not.

Companies that are “robotic” in name only, or use the term “robot” to describe products and services that do not enable or support devices acting in the physical world, are excluded. For example, this includes “software robots” and robotic process automation. Many firms have multiple locations in different countries. Company locations given in the analysis are based on the publicly listed headquarters in legal documents, press releases, etc.

Verification
Funding information is collected from a number of public and private sources. These include press releases from corporations and investment groups, corporate briefings, market research firms, and association and industry publications. In addition, information comes from sessions at conferences and seminars, as well as during private interviews with industry representatives, investors, and others. Unverifiable investments are excluded and estimates are made where investment amounts are not provided or are unclear.

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Skydio announced it has raised $230 million in funding following a year that saw its enterprise customer base exceed 1,200 organizations, just three years after entering the enterprise and public sector market.

Skydio drones are now used by every branch of the U.S. Department of Defense, by over half of all U.S. State Departments of Transportation, by over 200 public safety agencies in 47 states and across more than 60 energy utilities. The company has benefited from negative press related to competitor DJI, and restrictions for use of DJI drones by US government agencies.

Skydio is used by enterprises in over a dozen other industries. These customers are automating complex inspection tasks and getting situational awareness in life-and-death situations. On the strength of its autonomy technology, Skydio is now the largest drone manufacturer in the United States.

The $230 million Series E round brings Skydio’s total funding raised to $562 million with a current valuation of over $2.2 billion. Linse Capital led the round, joined by existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Next47, IVP, DoCoMo, NVIDIA, the Walton Family Foundation and UP.Partners. The company also welcomed new investors Hercules Capital and Axon, a technology leader in global public safety and a key Skydio technology partner.

“Drones enable the core industries that our civilization runs on—transportation, public safety, energy, construction, communications, defense, and more—to operate more safely and more efficiently, by putting sensors wherever they’re needed, whenever they’re needed, while keeping people safely on the ground. The transition to autonomy delivers a step change in the accessibility and utility of drones by removing the need for an expert pilot,” said Adam Bry, co-founder and CEO of Skydio. “We are still in the early innings of the industry, but we are seeing extraordinary demand globally from organizations addressing needs important to every citizen.”

Skydio Dock and Skydio Dock Lite, which are powered by the new Remote Ops software and allow drones to be flown without an operator on site, were recently announced. Skydio also just started offering Regulatory Services, which are helping to break through the Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) barrier by giving customers permission to fly Skydio drones even when they can’t see them, even if they are fully remote. The industry has reached a turning point when both the technology and the rules are ready for fully autonomous operations.

The company has grown by 30 times in the last three years, making it one of the fastest-growing companies in North America, according to the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 awards. The growth is happening in a market that has been dominated in the past by manually flown drones made by Chinese companies that have to follow China’s government policy. Geopolitical tensions that are getting worse have made it even more important to have safe, reliable drones for critical infrastructure, public safety, and defense.

Skydio uses market-leading autonomous flying technology and manufacturing within the US to solve these problems. Skydio added 40% to its staff last year. Skydio also unveiled its 36,000-square-foot Hayward, California production facility, a 10-fold increase in capacity. Skydio aims to add over 150 manufacturing jobs to its Hayward, CA factory and other U.S. locations to meet demand and service its increasing global customer base.

“Skydio drones are being used to save lives and aid in the maintenance of critical infrastructure in ways that sounded like science fiction just a few years ago,” offered Bastiaan Janmat, Managing Director, Linse Capital. “We couldn’t be more excited to continue our partnership with Skydio as they solidify their position as the world’s most innovative drone technology company.”

“Drones bring substantial value in maintaining public safety, in particular in terms of increasing visibility and providing a first line of communications for first responders. Skydio fills a critical need in making that value more readily accessible to key stakeholders such as law enforcement thanks to the power of autonomy,” said Henrik Kuhl, SVP, Strategy & Corporate Development at Axon. “We are excited to continue our go-to-market and technology partnership with Skydio as we work together to deepen adoption of this technology in public safety.”

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Fulfil Solutions, a robotics company that offers an automated grocery fulfillment system, announced that it is emerging from stealth mode with $60 million in Series B financing. 

Fulfil creates robots that can pick and pack grocery items across all product categories and temperature states. The company opened its first fully automated micro-fulfillment warehouse a few months ago in Mountain View, California in the San Francisco Bay area. 

“To address the many challenges facing online grocery, retailers must adopt efficient automation that substantially reduces costs and provides the accuracy, quality and convenience customers expect,” Fulfil CEO and President Mir Aamir said. “That’s why our fully automated solution represents such a revolutionary step forward. Not only does it make online grocery retailing profitable while meeting customer expectations, but it also prioritizes social and environmental responsibility by cutting carbon emissions, eliminating food waste and enabling healthier food to reach more households at lower cost.”

This micro-fulfillment warehouse was created in partnership with The Save Mart Companies, and it powers a same-day grocery delivery and pick-up service called Lucky Now. When Lucky Now receives an order, Fulfill’s robots start picking up groceries and packing them within minutes. When the order is fulfilled, the robots bring the finished orders to a waiting area where drivers can collect them. 

“The Save Mart Companies is thrilled to embrace innovative technologies that help deliver on-demand groceries to our customers on their own terms,” Shane Sampson, Executive Chairman of the Board at The Save Mart Companies, said. “With Lucky Now, powered by Fulfil’s robotic automation, we are excited to offer the best value on local and fresh products that our shoppers have come to know and trust.”

Fulfil’s system uses advanced AI, machine learning, and optical and sensor technologies to enable grocery picking. The company’s mobile robots split and sequence grocery items to prevent damage and minimize pack time, while dispense stations drop item into the mobile robot’s tops and redistribute inventory to balance loads. During all of this, a database tracks every item’s location, origin and expiration to ensure order accuracy. 

Fulfil’s funding round was led by Eclipse, and included participation from Khosla Ventures and DCVC. 

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Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is shutting down its subsidiary Everyday Robots, according to reporting from Wired. 

On January 20, 2023, Alphabet announced it would be laying off around 12,000 workers, 6% of its workforce, and Everyday Robots is one of the few projects disbanded as part of the budget cuts. Some of the technology and part of the Everyday Robots team will be consolidated into existing robotics projects within Google Research, Denise Gamboa, director of marketing and communications for Everyday Robots, told Wired. 

The company graduated from Alphabet’s X moonshot lab just over a year ago. The company taught over a hundred wheeled, one-armed robots to clean cafeteria tables, separate trash from recycling and open doors. 

Everyday Robots wanted to create flexible and adaptable robots that could be used outside of industrial environments. The company’s first prototype was unveiled in 2021, and in 2022, it was upgraded with Google’s AI language research to allow them to process natural language commands. 

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While the company had ambitious goals for its robots, they didn’t seem to ever make the commercialization stage even a decade after Alphabet acquired the company, although the robots did do some cleaning around Alphabet’s offices. Some of Alphabet’s other moonshot projects, like Loon, which created internet-beaming balloons, have already shut down for this very reason. 

Other previous moonshot projects, like Wing, a drone grocery delivery company, and Waymo, an autonomous driving company, still appear to be going strong. At the end of last year, Waymo announced that it would be expanding its service area in both San Francisco and Phoenix. 

According to Wired‘s reporting, a former employee from Everyday Robots said that the company struggled to determine the company’s mission. The team couldn’t decide if they were aiming for an advanced research project or a commercially viable product. 

Everyday Robots employed over 200 people, and Alphabet did not give any details about how many of those employees, or which, would be staying on with the company. 

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CaPow, a perpetual power solution provider, announced it raised a $7.5 million Seed round to scale up the commercialization of its battery-free, wireless, energy delivery eco-system for autonomous robotics. This solution provides continuous power for automated robotic environments while eliminating robot downtime due to charging. The round was led by IL Ventures, a VC fund focused on disruptive technologies for legacy industries, with co-investment from Mobilion VC, Payton Planar Magnetics, Doral Energy-Tech Ventures, Mobilitech Capital, and Mr. Ray Nissan, a prominent angel investor.

Today, many automated solutions rely on batteries for power supply. This dependency leads to several inherent inefficiencies such as charging downtime and rampant costs due to the need for additional robots to replace the ones that are being charged. Moreover, traditional batteries have a negative environmental impact, as they create safety hazards and are an operational “headache” since they require a dedicated procurement strategy, special shipping, handling, storage and recycling.

CaPow addresses the primary bottleneck for automation: the challenge of providing reliable, cost-effective, and non-pollutive energy. By offering consistent power flow for mobile robots, CaPow’s energy delivery eco-system allows automated robotic solutions to continuously operate with no energy depletion downtime while ending the concept of reliance on legacy batteries. CaPow’s “battery-free”, paradigm-shifting solution is being well received along the logistics value chain, as it is validated to cut down the size of the required robot fleet, enhance throughput and improve the ROI of automation.

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CaPow’s proprietary solution facilitates optimal power transfer with wide and dynamic capabilities. It accommodates multiple users, as well as the presence of metal and debris in and around the energy transfer field. In addition, it supports large distances between the transmitting and receiving ends, as well as wide spatial coverage. This provides substantial power levels with optimal end-to-end efficiency. The value of CaPow’s technology further expands to the wider mobility market with a wide range of applications. 

Mr. Amir Fishelov joins CaPow’s Board of Directors as Chairman of the Board, leveraging his two decades of experience as Co-Founder of SolarEdge (Nasdaq: SEDG), a pioneer and global leader in smart energy technology. At SolarEdge, a $17B company, Mr. Fishelov served as Chief Architect as well as VP of Strategy and Corporate Development, leading large-scale and complex energy management projects.

“With the backing of our investors and strategic partners, CaPow is challenging robot manufacturers, automation solution providers, and facility operators to change their definition of operational efficiency”, says Prof. Mor Peretz, Co-Founder & CEO at CaPow. “We look forward to accelerating our product development to meet strong market demand for our innovative and proven technology. The company will use the proceeds from the investment round to expedite business growth in markets around the world.”

“At IL Ventures, we align closely with CaPow’s mission of creating a sustainable, battery-free power supply for the industry,” says Yoni Heilbronn, Managing Partner at IL Ventures. “We are excited to invest in an exceptional and proven technology, which is a game changer for the entire robotic power landscape.”

“I am very proud BGN Technologies took part in bringing CaPow’s revolutionary technology to the market,” says Zafrir Levi, VP Exact Sciences at BGN, the commercialization arm of the Ben-Gurion University. “We wholeheartedly believe in CaPow’s Perpetual Power solution, and this investment is proof of the company’s superior technology and for the massive potential for disrupting the industry in which it operates”.

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Third Wave Automation (TWA) announced that it brought in a strategic investment from Qualcomm Ventures and Zebra Technologies. The latest investment brings the company’s total funding since it was founded in 2018 to $70 million. 

TWA brought in $15 million in 2020 as its Series A round and raised another $40 million in 2021, meaning this investment could be for up to $15 million. 

This investment will help TWA invest in new products, as its autonomous forklift product, Third Wave Automation Reach, expands its select pilot programs. TWA Reach is a fully automated reach truck that can handle any pallet or payload from the warehouse floor to the rack. The system uses TWA’s core automation technology and collaborative autonomy platform which enables remote operation and assistance, intelligent fleet management and continuous learning capabilities. 

“After successfully deploying our solution with key pilot customers, we are excited to expand the TWA Reach pilot program. This enables us to explore additional automation workflows and continue deploying flexible forklift automation technology,” Arshan Poursohi, TWA’s co-founder and CEO, said. “With the strategic investment from Qualcomm Ventures and Zebra Technologies, we look forward to scaling production of our forktrucks, deploying them with new customers in a wide variety of sites, continuing to innovate with new applications and additional materials handling vehicles, and perfecting our fleet management.”

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With the new funding, TWA hopes to expand its market offerings, accelerate new products for automating other classes of forklifts, like narrow aisle and counterbalance trucks, and integrate with other robotics products, like from Fetch Robotics, a subsidiary of Zebra Technologies and autonomous mobile robot (AMR) provider. 

“As our supply chain customers continue to battle labor shortages, they are turning to automation solutions to improve productivity. TWA’s autonomous, high-reach fork trucks streamline warehouse workflows, enabling operators to increase throughput and lower costs while also improving worker safety,” Tony Palcheck, managing director of Zebra Ventures at Zebra Technologies, said. “TWA’s approach aligns with Zebra’s goals, and we look forward to working with Arshan and the Third Wave team to improve material handling operations.”

TWA Reach was recently featured in The Robot Report’s “Best robots of CES 2023“. The article highlighted TWA Reach’s three operational modes: (1) manual; (2) remote operation; (3) fully autonomous operation.

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Ouster and Velodyne have completed their merger. The combined company will operate under the name Ouster and will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “OUST.” 

Velodyne ceased trading on the NASDAQ after markets closed on the day the merger was completed. Each Velodyne share was exchanged for .8204 shares of Ouster common stock. 

The combined company has over 850 customers spanning the automotive, industrial, robotics and smart infrastructure industries. Ouster expects to retain about 350 employees and will be headquartered in San Francisco, with other key offices in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. 

“We’re thrilled to have completed the merger with Velodyne so quickly, further boosting our financial position and our ability to accelerate LiDAR adoption,” Angus Pacala, CEO of Ouster, said. “Together, we have an even stronger team backed by a healthy balance sheet, new channel partners, and a wide selection of positive-margin products to serve a diverse set of customers and win more deals than ever before. We expect our innovative digital LiDAR roadmap, amplified by exciting new software solutions, to further expand our serviceable market and catalyze growth across the business.”

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Ouster now has an intellectual property portfolio with 173 granted and 504 pending patents. The combined company has a cash balance of over $315 million as of December 31, 2022. Ouster is on track to exceed its estimation that the combined company will save at least $75 million in operating costs within the first 9 months of the transaction’s close.

“The combined Ouster is stronger than ever, led by an esteemed executive leadership team and Board with deep company, industry, and financial expertise,” Dr. Ted Tewksbury, executive chair of Ouster’s Board of Directors, said. “Ouster is well positioned as a global leader in LiDAR backed by the talent, products, and technology roadmap to make performant and affordable LiDAR solutions pervasive while accelerating time to profitability and enhancing value for stockholders.”

The combined company’s executive leadership team is made up of:

• Angus Pacala, chief executive officer
• Mark Frichtl, chief technology officer
• Mark Weinswig, chief financial officer
• Darien Spencer, chief operations officer
• Nate Dickerman, president of field operations
• Megan Chung, general counsel

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