Six months after resigning as the CEO of Cruise, Kyle Vogt has raised $150 million for a new startup that's designing robots for use in the home.
Aptly named the Bot Company, the startup's investors include Spark Capital and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and the company is valued at $550 million, Forbes reported on Monday.
The Bot Company’s other investors also include former Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and Elad Gil, Vogt confirmed in a social media post.
Vogt co-founded autonomous driving company Cruise, now owned by GM, and led the company until November when he resigned after California regulators suspended Cruise's permits to offer passenger services, citing safety concerns.
That suspension came after a pedestrian was critically injured in an accident involving one of Cruise's vehicles. Regulators later found that the company mislead investigators by omitting crucial details about the incident, Reuters reported in December.
Vogt co-founded the new robotics company with former Tesla AI head Paril Jain and former Cruise engineer Luke Holoubek.
"We're building bots that do chores so you don't have to. Everyone is busy. Bots can help," Vogt wrote. "So many things compete for our time — commutes, longer working hours and the complexities of modern life. Our team has spent years building robots (including the self-driving kind) that give people some of that time back, and we're taking that a step further with this company."
The Bot Company is based in San Francisco, according to Vogt's LinkedIn profile.
A name reservation was also filed with California's Secretary of State on March 29 for "The Incredible Amazing Bot Company LLC." It's unclear if the two entities are related.
Boosted by the artificial intelligence boom, robotics companies have been scooping up investor cash this year.
In April, former Amazon executive Brad Porter raised $100 million in a Series B round for his Santa Clara startup, Collaborative Robotics. Also known as Cobot, the company has been tight-lipped about what its robot looks like but Porter has hinted at potential uses for warehouses.
And Sunnyvale-based Figure AI, which is developing a humanoid robot, raised $675 million earlier this year from investors including the OpenAI Startup Fund, Nvidia, Microsoft and Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos.
