- Built Robotics recently announced it closed $64 million in Series C funding. These are the details.
Construction autonomy company Built Robotics recently announced the closing of a $64 million Series C led by Tiger Global, which brought the total funding to $112 million. And existing investors including NEA, Founders Fund, Fifth Wall, and Building Ventures have joined the round.
Built’s upgrade kit (the Exosystem) can be installed and calibrated on an excavator in less than a day. And contractors can rent Exosystems as standalone units to install on their fleet of equipment, or they can lease pre-upgraded excavators from Built directly. The contractors pay an hourly fee to license the Exosystem’s autonomous software — and depending on utilization — they can realize cost savings of 20% or better versus traditional methods. Installation, training, and 24/7 support are included, and discounts are available for long-term rentals.
Tiger Global’s investment in Built comes at a time when the industry is broadly recognizing Built’s leadership in construction autonomy. And the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE), the 400,000-member union representing equipment operators in the US and Canada, has signed a first-of-its-kind training partnership with Built Robotics.
In addition, the International Standards Organization (ISO) has recently appointed Built’s Vice President Gaurav Kikani as a voting member on Technical Committee 127, the committee responsible for developing safety standards for autonomous earthmoving machinery.
KEY QUOTES:
“As a leader in autonomous construction technology, Built’s focus on easy-to-install robotic upgrades for heavy equipment is generating significant demand. We are excited to partner with them as their autonomous trenching solution helps transform the construction of solar farms, oil & gas projects, and other large and critical infrastructure projects around the world.”
— Griffin Schroeder, Partner, Tiger Global
“We’ve spent the past few years neck-deep in R&D, and it’s paid off. Our rental fleet is fully booked into 2023, and orders keep coming in. The Series C will give us the capital we need to ramp production and get our robots into the hands of more contractors. And autonomous trenching is just the first step — customers are already asking for backfill, compaction, material handling, loading trucks, and more.”
— Noah Ready-Campbell, CEO of Built Robotics
“The IUOE prides itself on having the best, most qualified, and safest operators, and our goal is to ensure that the best operators know how to use the best tools, and robots are certainly one of the tools of the future.”
— Russ Burns, consultant to the IUOE and retired General Vice President of the IUOE
