Ex-Cruise Chief Vogt Raises $150m For Robotics Start-Up

Former Cruise chief executive Kyle Vogt has reportedly completed a $150 million (£116m) funding round for his home robotics start-up The Bot Company, valuing the unproven company at $2bn, amidst a recent wave of AI-inspired investor enthusiasm for robotics ventures.

The funding, reported by Reuters, was led by Greenoaks and follows a previous $150m round from investors including former GitHub chief executive Nat Friedman, Pioneer founder Daniel Gross, Spark Capital and others announced last May that valued the company at $550m.

Given that The Bot Company has no customers, no products and no revenue, and is still building hardware and AI software, the funding is an indicator of investors’ and companies’ belief that large language models (LLMs) such as those that power chatbots can reshape robots by allowing them to understand complex human-language instructions and learn how to carry out new tasks.

Household robotics

The start-up is reportedly planning to use a non-humanoid design for a unit equipped with grips that can carry out household tasks such as folding laundry.

Tesla and start-up Figure AI have generated excitement around the potential of humanoid robots, while Cobot, founded by former Amazon staffer Brad Porter, has raised $146m for non-humanoid robots focusing on industrial automation.

Carmaker Mercedes-Benz said last week it is trialling humanoid robots from Texas-based start-up Apptronik for some tasks on its production lines.

Apptronik competes with rivals including Agility Robotics and 1X Technologies.

‘Spatial’ AI

Well-known Stanford AI researcher Li Feifei last September raised $230m to create “spatial” AI that can interact with and understand the three-dimensional world, building what it calls “large world models”, which it contrasts to the language-based approach of LLMs that power chatbots such as ChatGPT.

Li’s start-up, World Labs, declined to specify its valuation, but reports said the two funding rounds valued it at more than $1bn.

Venture capitalists invested some $6.1bn in robotics last year, up 19 percent from 2023, according to PitchBook, part of a broader venture investment wave in AI.