Trifo, a Santa Clara, California-based artificial intelligence home robot company, has announced that it has raised $11 million in funding to build the next generation of smart home robots. With a focus on indoor home environments, Trifo has developed an end-to-end integrated hardware/software system with sensing, perception, and decision capabilities designed for perceiving physics, geometry, and home environment semantics. Through this technology, robots are able to communicate with humans more naturally and learn new skills.
According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), the household personal service robots market is expected to hit $11 billion by 2022. Within the household, chores cost an estimated $11 trillion a year in consumer time. And data compiled by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) said that this figure is expected to hit nearly $23 trillion in 2025.
“Robot vacuum cleaners are currently the only home robots on the market, and unfortunately they are not as smart as people think,” said Trifo founder and CEO Zhe Zhang in a statement. “A true home robot has to have an advanced level of perception and be capable of interacting with occupants. Products in the market today are designed for a single function and are not intelligent enough to learn to perform other complex tasks for chore automation, such as learning your home’s indoor landscape or identifying the best time to perform tasks autonomously. Just as mobile phones act as the primary connection between people, home robots should be the connector between machines, homes, and its occupants, whether they are at home or not.”
Trifo’s first product address the lack of fully integrated robotic systems by launching a smart consumer robot vacuum, which has increased functionality at a lower cost than other home vacuum products. Plus Trifo is building consumer products that do more than clean floors. Trifo uses cameras, SLAM algorithms, 3D geometry, and 3D semantics to perform functions like visual mapping, obstacle avoidance, environmental perception, communications, and home surveillance.
And Trifo has named Xiangsheng Ge as the company’s new chief operating officer. Ge is the former COO of UBTECH Robotics. And Ge will be responsible for accelerating product development and overseeing the launch of advanced AI home robotics.
“Trifo has created first-to-market integrated hardware and software that enables dramatic performance improvements in home robotics,” added Ge. “I look forward to leveraging my experience and expertise to move the company forward rapidly to gain revenue and share in the fast-growing home robotics market.”
Currently, Trifo has more than 40 employees in Santa Clara, California; Shenzhen, China; and Beijing, China. Some of Trifo’s other investors include Walden International, Matrix Partners, Samsung Ventures, and Tsinghua AI Fund.
