Industrial automation startup RobCo Inc. today announced that it has closed a $40 million funding round.
Most of the shares that changed hands were sold by current and former employees. The investor consortium that bought the equity included Sequoia, Lightspeed and several other startup funds. RobCo is now valued at more than $1 billion, double what it was worth in January.
Germany-based RobCo sells more than a dozen robots designed to automate logistics and manufacturing tasks. Most of the machines are industrial arms. The largest, XL, can pick up 88 pounds and move payloads more than eight feet. It’s optimized for metalworking tasks.
RobCo’s lower-end robotic arms offer a different mix of features. Some have a complex set of joints that enables them to maneuver around obstacles, while others are optimized to pick up heavy items. RobCo’s simplest machine is a single-joint robotic arm designed to hold a camera above conveyor belts for quality inspection purposes.
The company’s flagship system is a two-armed, mobile robot called Alfie. It’s capable of automating tasks that can’t be performed by a traditional robotic arm. For example, an automaker could configure Alfie to stabilize a car part with one arm and use the other to apply paint.
The items that an industrial robot processes change on a regular basis. For example, a piece of merchandise might arrive in a larger box than usual or the number of components on a conveyor belt might suddenly increase. Historically, such changes required companies to update their industrial robots’ software. That slowed down production and increased operating costs.
RobCo says that Alfie can adapt to changes without manual code updates. That versatility is made possible by an artificial intelligence engine called RobVision.
Customers can activate RobVision by uploading a photo of the item they plan to process with Alfie. The software creates synthetic, or AI-generated, variations of the photo and uses them to train a custom AI model. Once the model is installed on an Alfie robot, it automatically adapts to production line changes.
Companies can customize the behavior of RobCo’s machines using a development tool called RobFlow. It provides pre-programmed robot commands that each correspond to a specific motion, a pause or some other action. RobFlow enables users to mix and match those commands into multistep workflows without writing any code.
The third component of RobCo’s software stack, RobCo Studio, can be used to optimize a robot’s hardware configuration. It also eases related tasks such as scheduling maintenance work.
Today’s investment will help RobCo grow its U.S. presence. The company’s founding chief executive, Roman Hölzl, moved to San Francisco ahead of the funding round. RobCo. maintains a manufacturing facility in Austin and has customers across a dozen states.