Today, InOrbit announced our latest funding news, with $2.6 million in seed round funding to help us on our goal to support 1 million robots that will positively impact the lives of 1 billion people.
We started InOrbit more than 2 years ago to help accelerate the adoption of robotics at scale. At the time, there were no good platforms to manage fleets of robots in the field, and most companies had to cobble together tools that were hard to maintain, and often didn’t work as their fleet grew.
We are fortunate to have a great investor roster, including ANIMO Ventures, Yamaha Motor Ventures Silicon Valley, Kärcher New Venture, Motus Ventures and prominent high-net worth individuals, including members of Berkeley Angel Network, a group of angel investors comprised of alumni of UC Berkeley, and the Creative Destruction Lab. This round will give InOrbit a boost on our journey to enable robotics companies and organizations deploying robots to grow exponentially.
The use of InOrbit for robot operations, or RobOps, becomes mission critical as the number of robots for companies grows from fewer than 50 robots to a fleet of hundreds or thousands.
Take, for instance, Bossa Nova, which is growing their fleet 20x in just a few months.
“Bossa Nova is working with InOrbit to monitor our shelf scanning robots in stores across the U.S.,” said Sarjoun Skaff, co-founder and CTO. “InOrbit’s platform has helped us meet and exceed the expectations of our customers. We value this partnership as we take another step towards achieving our mission of powering the transformation of retail.”
We are often asked why robot companies that are developing specific robot systems aren’t just creating this type of software themselves. In fact, many do, and InOrbit can complement their internal, application-specific systems with a full-featured, scalable multi-cloud platform.
But don’t take our word for it. Here’s Steve Cousins, CEO of Savioke:
“Working with the InOrbit team has given us deeper visibility into the health of our fleet, streamlining problem resolution. This includes issues with the robots themselves, or more often the setting where robots are operating. Relying on InOrbit allows our product engineers to focus on advancing the state of the art instead of monitoring operational details."
Steve is a pioneer in robotics who led the well-known Willow Garage, where he oversaw the creation of the robot operating system (ROS), and serves on the board of Open Robotics.
If you’d like to learn more about InOrbit, we invite you to join us for a demo of our platform.