When Seth Winterroth left his job at GE Ventures to help launch Eclipse in 2015, robotics was on his mind. Or more specifically, the number of early-stage robotics startups that were struggling to launch due to lack of interest.
“These are teams that had just finished their postdocs at Waterloo, or CMU, or MIT and were starting robotics companies, and the refrain that I continually heard from the startups was, ‘Hey, we’re having a really hard time raising institutional venture capital,’” Winterroth told TechCrunch. “At the time in Silicon Valley, most venture capital was going into the very mature application layer or the application layer of some very mature computing platforms.”
A lot has changed since then.
Now, after investing in robotics startups for 10 years, Winterroth, a partner at Eclipse, said the time to invest in robotics has never been better. The robotics startup market has matured and the hardware and software powering these bots has gotten significantly better — and cheaper.
Venture investing in the category is gaining momentum as well. Investors poured $6 billion into robotics startups in the first seven months of 2025 according to Crunchbase data. The data company predicts that this year’s funding totals will eclipse 2024, making it one of the only non-AI categories to experience a boost in funding.
While one could argue that robotics is seeing a surge in investor interest because of AI — and it’s not wrong to acknowledge AI’s role in the advancement of robotic tech — investors who have focused on the category longer than the last few years said the industry didn’t get to this point just because of advancements in AI over the past few years.
Reaching maturatio
The real catalyst for the industry to start gaining momentum actually happened back in 2012, Winterroth said, when Kiva Systems, a small startup based out of Massachusetts, got acquired by Amazon.
“I like to say Kiva Systems’ acquisition was the acquisition that launched 1,000 robotic startups,” Winterroth said. “Between 2011 and 2015, 2016, that really was the case. You just saw a number of different new companies get started. Some like 6 River Systems, or Clearpath Robotics, were successful, but most were not. But that talent learns and that learning compounds, and it’s brought into the next set of ventures.”
This first wave helped attract engineers to the sector and helped companies figure out product-market-fit, he said.
Kira Noodleman, a partner at Bee Partners, echoed this. Noodleman told TechCrunch the last decade of trial and error helped startups figure out what the market is actually looking for when it comes to robotics and automation.
Some companies, like Rapid Robotics, which Noodleman backed, shut down trying to figure out what the market wanted. Those failures have helped the next batch of startup founders, who now have a much better idea of what potential customers want from this sector.
Noodleman had a similar experience with her own investing thesis, she said, which changed as the market matured.
“Lights out manufacturing assumes there are zero humans in the loop; that is just not happening. We proved that already back in the 2010s,” Noodleman said. “Let me take a simple task, machine tending, all it is is someone’s hand putting something in and out of a machine. The point here is you can imagine how many low-hanging fruit, repetitive tasks there are, like machine tending.”
Fady Saad, a general partner at early-stage robotics-focused Cybernetix Ventures, also launched his firm prior to the AI boom after he noticed he was spending a lot of time connecting early-stage robotics companies to sources of funding during his time as a co-founder at MassRobotics.
Falling hardware costs have also driven investor interest in the sector, Saad said, noting that it’s cheaper to build robots today than five years ago. This allows companies to have a more viable path to scale and makes them more attractive to potential venture backers.
“The cost of building robotics has been going dramatically down,” Saad said. “Advances in sensor technology, compute, and batteries, all of that, it was the perfect timing to start full-stack robotics solutions.”
Advancements in AI aren’t hurting the industry either. While AI is being touted by many as the main reason why robotics are starting to see an increase in interest — alongside an Elon Musk-driven fascination with humanoid robots — it isn’t the only factor.
Saad added that while AI and large language models can be helpful for training robots, these LLMs are primarily trained on online information, whereas robots interact with the real world.
There are companies building models based on that real-life data; Nvidia just released a new set of world models for robot training in August. But Saad predicted it will take a bit longer to capture and train robots, especially those that will exist alongside people, on world data.
Present day
Momentum in the industry may be starting to swell, but that doesn’t mean every startup has figured out the best approach yet. Nor are some categories within robotics as mature as others.
Some of the first few markets to adopt robotics and automation, including manufacturing, warehousing, and construction, continue to be attractive for robotics startup backers.
For Winterroth, Saad, and Noodleman, healthcare and surgical-related robots remain a compelling area to invest in too. Noodleman adds eldercare to that category as well.
“In-home assistance is interesting, coming from me having looked at industrial robotics for 10 years,” Noodleman said. “Manufacturing and mining, burning labor shortages, aging populations, no humans are available at any price, even imperfect robotics are better than nothing.”
Saad added that vertically focused robotics companies tend to have access to more real-world and physical data, too, than horizontal players.
One area that these VCs are not as excited about are humanoids or consumer — and especially not consumer-focused humanoids.
Saad isn’t convinced that people will want to have a robot in their house anytime soon. He added that even non-humanoid consumer-focused robotics companies have struggled to get consumers excited.
“The only successful consumer robot company, iRobot, failed to come up with a second act,” Saad said. “Pool cleaning robot, lawn mower, mopping and floor-cleaning robot, none of these worked out for whatever reason.”
While the industry is still years away from commercial success of more intricate robotic models, like humanoids, VCs are pouring more capital into the sector. Despite the fact that this interest is driving up the costs of deals, the surge in interest is a net positive for the industry, Winterroth and Saad said, as the potential customer base for robotics startups continues to grow.
“There are enough examples of successful commercial organizations, successful robotics companies, that have become a valuable commercial organization,” Winterroth said. “Ten, 15 years ago, it was questionable whether or not there was going to be a large and thriving marketplace for these types of solutions. Now there’s a lot of customer awareness.”