RobCo Inc. has raised $40 million in a funding round that values the industrial automation startup at more than $1 billion, twice what it was worth in January. Most of the shares sold in the round came from current and former employees, with Sequoia, Lightspeed and several other startup funds making up the investor consortium that bought the equity. The Germany-based company sells robots used to automate logistics and manufacturing work.
RobCo’s catalog includes more than a dozen machines, most of them industrial arms. Its largest, the XL, is optimized for metalworking and can lift 88 pounds and move payloads more than eight feet. The lower-end arms split into different feature sets: some use a complex joint arrangement to maneuver around obstacles, others are built for lifting heavy items, and the simplest is a single-joint arm that holds a camera above conveyor belts for quality inspection.
The flagship system is Alfie, a two-armed mobile robot that handles tasks a traditional robotic arm cannot. An automaker, for example, could set Alfie to hold a car part steady with one arm while painting it with the other. Alfie’s main pitch is adaptability. Industrial robots routinely face changes in the items they process, such as merchandise arriving in a larger box or a sudden increase in components on a conveyor belt, and such shifts have historically forced companies to update robot software, slowing production and raising operating costs. RobCo says Alfie adjusts without manual code updates.
That capability comes from an artificial intelligence engine called RobVision. Customers upload a photo of the item they plan to process, and the software generates synthetic variations of the image to train a custom AI model. Once installed on an Alfie robot, the model adapts automatically to production line changes. A separate tool, RobFlow, offers pre-programmed commands for motions, pauses and other actions that users combine into multistep workflows without writing code. A third component, RobCo Studio, helps optimize a robot’s hardware configuration and handles tasks such as scheduling maintenance.
The new investment will support RobCo’s expansion in the United States, where the company has been building out its presence. Founding chief executive Roman Hölzl moved to San Francisco ahead of the funding round. RobCo operates a manufacturing facility in Austin and counts customers across a dozen states.
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