LG-backed Bay Area Robot Waiter Startup Nabs Meaty Plate Of Funding

Source: Bay Area Inno, Sara Bloomberg – Staff Reporter
Photo: Courtesy of Bear Robotics

A Redwood City startup developing autonomous robots that can serve dishes to diners has raised $60 million in fresh funding.

LG Electronics led the Series C round for Bear Robotics, which announced the funding round on Tuesday.

“This strategic boost accelerates Bear Robotics into new frontiers, focusing on emerging markets like smart warehousing and supply chain automation,” the company wrote in a LinkedIn post.

The new funding comes just about two years since Bear Robotics announced its Series B which clocked in at $81 million.

Bear Robotics didn’t disclose its new valuation but the company was valued at $481 million after its Series B, according to PitchBook.

The new funding also brings the company’s total funding to more than $186 million, and its previous investors include IMM Private Equity, the Lotte Group of Korea and SoftBank.

CEO John Ha founded the company in 2017 after buying a restaurant, Kang Nam Tofu House in Milpitas. Before that, he was also a senior software engineer at Google for more than five years.

“If you know anything about Korean restaurants, there’s lots of different side dishes so the waiters have to constantly go back and forth delivering them,” co-founder Juan Higueros told Bay Area Inno in a 2022 interview. “We wanted to make a tool to do that for them, and we realized this was a problem at every restaurant.”

Other Bay Area robotics companies have been scooping up capital as well.

Last month, Sunnyvale-based humanoid robot developer Figure AI announced a $675 million round that included investors such as the OpenAI Startup Fund, Nvidia, Microsoft and Jeff Bezos.

In Pescadero, Hippo Harvest is developing automated produce-harvesting robots and raised a $21 million Series B round last month.

Santa Clara-based Collaborative Robotics raised $30 million from Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures and other investors last year but has kept details about its robot a secret.

Electric Sheep Robotics has developed autonomous lawn mowers, which the San Francisco startup has already launched. The company was one of Bay Area Inno’s Startups to Watch this year.

Emeryville-based Covariant is developing software for robotics that is powered by artificial intelligence, specially large language models. The company has raised $245 million since 2018, according to PitchBook.

Last month, Y Combinator published an updated “request for startups” where it outlined 20 categories of interest. That list included companies that are applying machine learning to robotics.

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/inno/stories/fundings