Elementary Robotics raises $3.6 million for intelligent robot assistants

Thanks to VentureBeat –

There’s a lot of money in robotics. The industrial machines market is forecast to be worth $41.23 billion by 2020, according to Grand View Research, with startups like GreyOrange and RightHand leading the charge. But they’re not the only game in town.

Los Angeles’ Elementary Robotics today announced that it has raised $3.6 million in seed financing. The funding was led by Fika Ventures and Fathom Capital, with participation from a bevy of new investors, including Toyota AI Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures, Riot.vc, Osage University Partners, and Stage Venture Partners. It’s the company’s second round, following a pre-seed investment in October 2017. As part of the round, Fika’s Eva Ho will join the company’s board, sitting alongside Arye Barnehama, Elementary’s cofounder and CEO, and Idealab’s Bill Gross.

Barnehama — who previously built and sold wearable technology company Melon to Daqri, an industrial AR startup that has gone on to raise $275 million and that led Daqri’s hardware and design department — wasn’t willing to reveal much about Elementary Robotics’ product lineup just yet. But he believes that it’s positioned to become the “world leader” in next-generation assistive robotics, in part because of a proprietary vision stack with a lower bill of materials than many competing systems.

“[Our autonomous machines] will be lower-cost, human-safe, and driven by software innovations, such as machine learning, AI, and computer vision,” he said.