Teleo, a company building autonomous technology for heavy equipment, today announced it has raised $16.2 million in Series A extension funds in addition to its previously announced Series A funding round. The company will use the funds to scale customer deployments and continue its expansion in new industries that use heavy machinery, such as wheel loaders, terminal tractors, excavators, etc.
Teleo will also use the funding to enhance its AI capabilities, such as advancing autonomous features, integrating large language models (LLMs) to unlock operator efficiency, and collecting real-world data to continue training AI models. And Teleo’s first extension round, totaling $9.2 million, was led by UP.Partners, with participation from other investors, such as new investor Trousdale Ventures and return investor F-Prime Capital. This second extension – totaling $7 million – was also led by UP.Partners, with participation from new investor Triatomic Capital and returning investors F-Prime Capital and Trucks Venture Capital, among others. Since its founding in 2019, Teleo has raised $29.8 million.
Teleo also recently announced it received new orders for 34 machines from a total of 9 new customers from new and existing industries. And the company secured customers in the pulp and paper; logging; port logistics; munition clearing; and agriculture industries. The company is also targeting expansion into other industries such as airports; waste and recycling; logistics; warehousing; etc.
Teleo also converts any make, model, and vintage of heavy equipment, such as bulldozers, wheel loaders, and excavators, into autonomous and remote-operated robots. And the combination of remote and autonomous operations, called Supervised Autonomy, enabling one operator to supervise multiple autonomous machines working simultaneously by enabling the operator to remotely perform complex tasks as needed.
The operator sits at a central command center that could be stationed locally or thousands of miles away. And there are many industries that use heavy machines to perform repeatable and predictable tasks where Teleo’s technology can help, especially amid historic labor shortages. For example, the Associated General Contractors of America estimates that 91% of construction firms are having a hard time finding workers to hire, driving up costs and project delays.
Teleo’s global dealer partner network, which was launched in 2023, includes dealer partners in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, North Africa, and the Middle East. And the company also demonstrated the world’s longest supervised autonomous operation in history, when operators in Dallas controlled machines at a worksite in Finland, over 5,000 miles away.
KEY QUOTES:
“Our strong conviction in Teleo’s solution comes from the incredible impact their technology for remote and autonomous operations of heavy machinery is having for some of the largest operators in the world. In addition to significant productivity gains, Teleo creates a positive effect on the workforce, where skilled labor shortages are endemic to the industry. Teleo’s retrofit technology helps to make equipment operator jobs more accessible and safer, in addition to improving customer profitability by reviving machines that were otherwise sitting idle.”
– Adam Grosser, Chairman and Managing Partner at UP.Partners
“Teleo’s technology has created a groundswell of support and excitement with its customers, distributors, and across the industries it serves. It’s rare to find a technology that delivers on the promise of being truly revolutionary for legacy industries and capable of solving a wide range of challenges, such as labor shortages. Teleo is capturing customers across an array of industries, and the company is positioned well to scale quickly.”
– Sanjay Aggarwal, Venture Partner, F-Prime Capital
“There is a strong value proposition of our technology across many industries that leverage heavy machinery and our focus is to fulfill and scale our solid pipeline of orders. There’s a wider, untapped range of industries where Teleo Supervised Autonomy can provide instant value. We will use these funds to further deploy and scale our technology so we can continue to address historic labor shortages and deliver a positive impact.”
— Vinay Shet, Co-founder and CEO, Teleo
