- Trifo, a smart home device company known for making a home security robot vacuum, announced it raised $15 million in Series B
Trifo — a smart home device company known for making a home security robot vacuum — announced it has raised $15 million in Series B funding. Including this round, Trio has raised $26 million to date.
The Series B investors include Yidu Cloud, Tsinghua AI Fund, and Matrix Partners. This round of funding will be used to support continued hardware and software development on future Trifo AI home robots, U.S. and European market expansion, and talent acquisition.
“We support Trifo’s vision for AI home robots, which goes beyond traditional cleaning capabilities,” explained Rick Liang, Senior Vice President of Yidu Cloud. “With the strategic investment in Trifo, we look forward to enhancing the home robot experience into a new dimension (i.e., healthy home and consumer-level health monitoring).”
Trifo’s new Lucy device has an AI-powered brain that enables the robot to protect its home with advanced surveillance technology. And it also cleans the home with one of the most powerful vacuums on the market.
“Trifo has quickly developed highly advanced algorithms and AI-based robotic intelligence and monetized these into commercially-viable products,” stated Yicheng Li, Partner at Tsinghua AI Fund. “We are eager to support the company and Zhe’s leadership as it expands its offering into a complete ecosystem of home robots to serve a wide range of people’s needs.”
In a survey of over 500 consumers, Clutch learned that smart home appliances are the connected devices people own and use the most. And two-thirds of people (67%) own a smart home appliance and 49% use smart home appliances the most compared to other connected devices. The Lucy vacuum product is known as the “superhero big sister,” which complements that Max.
“Revenue for smart home products globally will grow to $28.4 billion in 2020, up 54% from $18.5 billion in 2018, and the feature set of these devices continues to improve,” said Trifo founder and CEO Zhe Zhang. “Lucy reflects the evolution of our products from robot vacuums to AIoT-enabled home robots that can assist with a wide range of features that help people with their life and work.”
Lucy has day and night surveillance through a 1080p HDR color camera and a second active depth sensor that provides night vision. And with this unique combination, Lucy utilizes RGB and depth information like no other home robot to handle high precision position tracking, indoor mapping, and intelligent self-decision-making. Plus it also provides unique day and night surveillance functionality on a mobile platform.
Lucy is also the first smart home robot to recognize and divide rooms automatically. And with an advanced 6-core ARM SoC, Lucy pushes the limit of accurate and efficient inference and brings edge AI to reality. Cleaning areas can also be designated through the Trifo Home App. Plus Lucy is also Alexa-enabled and it follows instructions to clean or not clean zones with “no-go” lines.
Another benefit to Lucy is that it can avoid obstacles including pet waste, slippers, socks, etc. While most home robots cannot recognize obstacles less than 4” tall, Lucy detects 1” obstacles.
Lucy can also recognize furry family members so you will know if your pet does something mischievous while you are sleeping.
In terms of battery life, Lucy has a 5,200 mAh battery to keep it running 120 minutes before it needs to be charged up again.
