Former Amazon Robotics Executive Raises $100 Million For Santa Clara Startup
Source: Bay Area Inno, Sara Bloomberg – Staff Reporter
Photo: Collaborative Robotics CEO Brad Porter, center, with his team
Santa Clara startup Collaborative Robotics has raised $100 million in a new round that more than triples its total funding.
The round was led by General Catalyst and also included Bison Ventures, Industry Ventures, Lux Capital, Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures.
Also known as Cobot, the startup’s total funding now stands at $140 million including a Sequoia-led Series A round that closed last year.
The Series B announced on Wednesday also valued the company at $500 million, Business Insider reported.
Cobot was founded in 2022 by CEO Brad Porter, a former vice president at Amazon where he oversaw the ecommerce giant’s robotics division.
Porter was also briefly CTO of Scale AI.
Cobot has been tight-lipped about exactly what its robot looks like, showing early prototypes only to a handful of investors.
“While we were and still are, in stealth on the actual robot design, we felt like we could finally lift the covers on our ambition for our investors,” Porter wrote in a blog post on Wednesday describing a Jan. 30 demonstration for the company’s venture backers.
Porter also hinted at potential warehouse uses for its robots and described its design strategy as combining many off-the-shelf components to achieve an “entirely novel” robot.
“There’s nothing like it that can move existing boxes, totes and carts in commercial environments,” Porter wrote.
Weaving artificial intelligence into its robotics may also have boosted investor interest in Cobot.
“There’s a recognition that AI is going to make robotics more flexible, more adaptable, easier to integrate, and therefore, it’s going to be possible to deploy robots in ways that were hard to do five years ago, or going to become much easier to do,” Porter told Business Insider.
Another Bay Area startup that’s bringing AI and robotics together also recently raised a large round.
Last month Sunnyvale-based Figure AI announced an eyepopping $675 million Series B round at a $2.6 billion valuation from investors that included the OpenAI Startup Fund, Nvidia, Microsoft and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.