A Santa Clara robotics company says its upcoming product will be like nothing seen before, but that's about all it will divulge on the subject.
Top investors, however, must have seen enough to find the claim promising. The startup, Collaborative Robotics, just received $30 million in funding led by Sequoia Capital and with participation from Khosla Ventures, Mayo Clinic, Calibrate, Neo and 1984.vc, bringing its total funding to $40 million. Sequoia Partner Alfred Lin will join the company's board.
Brad Porter, CEO of Collaborative Robotics, says the company will likely begin shipping out its robots to customers as early as next year, but does not want to reveal the product just yet, adding to the mystery of just what they look like and how they will function.
"The robot we're developing, what it's capable of doing, doesn't really exist in the marketplace today," Porter said. "We're building something designed to work in and alongside humans in commercial spaces, but not just fenced in spaces. So it can work in warehouses and manufacturing and logistics, but also in hospitals, stadiums, airports, and the problem we're solving is the movement."
The company is building one model of robot that can work in multiple settings and fulfill multiple roles, mainly in terms of moving, loading and unloading boxes, totes and carts in busy commercial areas.
Porter founded Collaborative Robotics last year after a brief stint as chief technology officer at Scale AI. However, he built his robotics bona fides as VP of robotics at Amazon, where he was able to see first hand the benefits and pitfalls of warehouse robots used by the logistics giant.
"The big lesson I learned from Amazon is that you can invest a lot of money in R&D to build a robot that serves a very niche market or find out the market isn't as big as as you would hope it would be," Porter said. "So to develop a new robot that can work in a lot of different process paths and a lot of adjacencies, you have to have been in a position where you're seeing a lot of these paths and adjacencies, and I think that's where our team has a unique vantage."
Other companies have made strides in developing their own bots. Most recently Figure AI announced its human resembling, humanoid, robot took its first steps and was able to secure additional funding. However, Porter said companies aiming to develop humanoid robots are a way away from going to market and are more expensive and complex for the task at hand.
Collaborative's bot falls in the middle between simple single-task warehouse robots and the more complex human-like robots, he added.
"We think we can bring something much more pragmatic to market much sooner that can handle a number of human scale tasks in a more flexible way and a more affordable and more trustworthy, more adaptable," Porter said. "And so, we think we're occupying a unique spot in the robotics ecosystem that is not well served."
Though Collaborative's hardware is still under development, the startup already has multiple customers in the biotech, healthcare and logistics sectors, according to Porter. The company provides a professional service called the Cobot Flywheel Program, which aims to help companies deploy warehouse automation systems in their supply chain successfully. One customer using the service is Mayo Clinic, who's also a current investor in the company.
Collaborative Robotics has 23 employees with offices in Santa Clara and San Francisco.
