- Robot management software company Freedom Robotics announced it raised $6.6 million in seed funding
Freedom Robotics — a company that provides cloud and on-device software for monitoring, control, and management of robots and robotic fleets — announced it closed $6.6 million in a seed round of funding. With this round of funding, Freedom Robotics is planning to continue development of its platform and to hire “top talent.”
What does Freedom Robotics do? The company takes on the “heavy lifting” of creating tools and infrastructure that all robotics companies require, but “are not core to their product or value creation.” And by using Freedom Robotics’ software, robotics companies can take their products to market 10 times faster with half of the team and resources as compared to full-stack in-house development — which directly results in a more efficient deployment of resources, stronger focus of top engineers on core product and additional opportunities to get to product-market fit sooner.
This round of funding was led by Initialized Capital. Toyota AI Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures, Andrew Miklas from S28 Capital, and James Lindenbaum also joined the round. And existing investors Green Cow Venture Capital, Justin Kan, Josh Buckley, Kevin Patrick Mahaffey, and Arianna Simpson also participated in the funding.
“We are incredibly proud of this milestone for our company,” said Freedom Robotics CEO Joshua Wilson in a statement via Robotics Business Review. “Support from the top VC firms in the world like Initialized Capital, Toyota AI Ventures, and S28 Capital has further accelerated our team in providing the best tools, services, and infrastructure needed by new and veteran robotics companies to build, scale, and operate everything from prototypes to fleets of thousands of robots.”
Freedom said its software is currently being used on robots across all industries such as agriculture, restaurants, factories, warehouse logistics, last-mile delivery networks, and several others.
“We’ll soon reach a point where there are more robots than cell phones, and we’ll need the ‘Microsoft of robotics’ platform to power such a massive market,” added Garry Tan — the managing partner at Initialized Capital. “Freedom Robotics has a huge first-mover advantage and the collective past experience to be the team that stays in front of the tailwind and wins.”
The system designed by Freedom Robotics consists of several features to help robotics companies started from the prototyping stage to scaling up their fleets globally. It includes features such as monitoring what robots are doing in unpredictable real-world environments, controlling when issues arise on a robot, managing data collected automatically from robots in a fleet through the Freedom Robotics Mission Control dashboard, and analyzing cloud-based issues and performance reports.
“Cloud learning will be a game-changer for robotics, allowing the experience of one robot to be ‘taught’ to the rest on the network. We’ve been looking for startups with the technology and market savvy to realize this cloud robotics future through fleet management, control, and analytics,” said Jim Adler — the founding managing director at Toyota AI Ventures. “We were impressed with Freedom Robotics’ customer-first, comprehensive approach to managing and controlling fleets of robots, and look forward to supporting the Freedom team as they make cloud robotics a market reality,” explained Jim Adler of Toyota AI Ventures.
