Growing Venture Interest in General Purpose Robotics Startups
Seems like 2024 is turning a page in venture interest in robotics
We have been interested in and discussing about the intersection of technologies of Generative AI, robotics hardware, and systems for a while. There has been a ton of research trying to put the three together in recent years. A recent MIT Technology Preview article reviewed why Robotics might be about to have its Chat GPT Moment and discussed research on Extreme Parkor, RFM-1, Mobile-ALOHA, and RT-2 that we have previously discussed in this forum. A quick takeaway from the article is that while robotics was always considered a slow moving field, the intersection of robots with AI is opening up many opportunities for rapid progress, because robots now have access to vast knowledge banks of information. More importantly, robots can learn on the go because of techniques such as Reinforcement Learning.
The arrival of the ventures
Till now, commercial and venture investment in the field of robotics has been mainly in integration of robots in narrow verticals, such as Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), defense equipment, agriculture, warehouses, etc. This State of Robotics report highlights the patterns of investment in robotics (Note: For the investment and financial world, the category of robotics includes fully working robots, as well as robot components such as sensors, controls, and motors). While 2023 has seen a slowdown in investments in the totality of the robotics ecosystems (in broad lines with market sentiments across the globe), it is important to know that seed investments in robotics have remained the same.
2024 is the first year when we see lots of examples of venture activity in building general purpose robots which can likely perform in a wide variety of settings without requiring a lot of customization). It is still very early days, but there is ample evidence pointing to a likelihood that there may be a commercial enterprise waiting in the wings to dominate the general-purpose robotics market in the next 5 years time horizon. Let us consider the following examples of how 2024 has been different.