RobCo Raises $40 Million at More Than $1 Billion Valuation to Expand U.S. Robotics Business

Most of the shares that changed hands were sold by current and former employees, according to SiliconANGLE. The investor consortium that bought the equity included Sequoia, Lightspeed and several other startup funds.

RobCo sells more than a dozen robots built to automate logistics and manufacturing tasks, most of them industrial arms. The largest, called XL, can pick up 88 pounds and move payloads more than eight feet, and is optimized for metalworking. The company's lower-end arms carry a different mix of features: some have a complex set of joints that let them maneuver around obstacles, while others are built to pick up heavy items. Its simplest machine is a single-joint robotic arm that holds a camera above conveyor belts for quality inspection.

The flagship system is a two-armed mobile robot named Alfie, which the company says can automate tasks beyond the reach of a conventional robotic arm. An automaker, for example, could configure Alfie to stabilize a car part with one arm while applying paint with the other.

Industrial robots typically process items that change on a regular basis. A piece of merchandise may arrive in a larger box than usual, or the number of components on a conveyor belt may suddenly increase. Historically, such shifts forced companies to update their robots' software, slowing production and raising operating costs. RobCo says Alfie can adapt without manual code updates, a capability it attributes to an artificial intelligence engine called RobVision.

Customers activate RobVision by uploading a photo of the item they plan to process with Alfie. The software generates synthetic variations of the photo and uses them to train a custom AI model. Once that model is installed on an Alfie robot, the machine automatically adapts to production line changes. Companies can also customize how RobCo's machines behave through a development tool called RobFlow, which offers pre-programmed commands corresponding to specific motions, pauses or other actions; users mix and match those commands into multistep workflows without writing code. A third piece of the software stack, RobCo Studio, is used to optimize a robot's hardware configuration and to handle related tasks such as scheduling maintenance.

RobCo said the new investment will help it grow its U.S. presence. Founding chief executive Roman Hölzl moved to San Francisco ahead of the funding round. The company maintains a manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas, and has customers across a dozen states.