Few things are more devastating for a startup than to be working on the wrong problem. That’s why we spent time early on, before we had even formed our company or written the first line of code, to make sure we were working on a real problem that has a significant impact for a large number of people. We met with dozens of people across the robotics landscape to learn, asked lots of open-ended questions and listened carefully, honing our pattern-recognition.

It seems that every week there’s news about a new amazing application of robotics, from e-commerce, to growing food or building houses. While for many people this may seem to be something for the distant future, it is happening now and will continue to scale rapidly over the next couple of years.

This rapid acceleration results from a convergence of factors, including advances in sensors, deep learning and computer vision algorithms, chipsets that can handle AI tasks and software standards such as the Robot Operating System (ROS).

We’ve seen this before

The annual convention of leaders in robotics took place September 25-27 in Santa Clara, CA. RoboBusiness is the prime conference on the business of robotics, with world-class speakers and top exhibitors from around the world.

At InOrbit we chose RoboBusiness for our commercial launch. The interest far exceeded our expectations: the traffic at our booth was virtually non-stop, often with multiple conversations going on with members of our team at once.

The market for autonomous service robots is on the verge of a massive expansion. This has been largely driven by advancements in core technologies such as computer vision as well as lower cost of key hardware components and a standardized software stack.

Like we’ve seen with other technology waves such as cloud and mobile, venture capital is pouring into the robotics space, tripling in size from 2016 to 2017 and reaching +5B in 2017 by some estimates, which in turn is attracting more startups tackling an incredible variety of problems, from life-saving to mundane.

InOrbit, the platform for RobOps (DevOps for Robotics) is now generally available. After months of working closely with customers who joined our Early Access Program, we are ready to work with robotics companies that are growing their fleet of autonomous robots.