Venture Capital
Green Cow VC Blog - Domo Arigato, Freedom Roboto - GCVC Portfolio Company, Freedom Robotics, Raises $6.6M
Green Cow VC Blog - Domo arigato, Freedom Roboto - GCVC portfolio company, Freedom Robotics, raises $6.6M
I first met Freedom Robotics’ co-founder Josh Wilson at YC’s winter 2007 demo day (he was on his second startup at the time). I vividly remember the bottle of champagne and check I handed him some weeks later on an SF street as it was the first venture investment with which I’d ever been involved. Fresh out of MIT Media Lab, Josh and his partner were determined to make our devices communicate better. That startup wasn’t meant to be — not for lack of trying or follow-on funding from Sequoia and a16z— but the product name, Skynet, did provide an inkling of the future.
More than ten years later, Josh approached me with a new idea. I was humbled and happy to be a sounding board. “The world is going to be taken over by Robots!” he would exclaim. Ok, not à la Terminator, but Josh was on to something. Robots will have a ubiquitous influence on society:
- By 2025, machines will perform more tasks than humans.
- VC funding in robotics grew from $1.5B between 2009–2014 to $7.7B from 2015–2018.
- Robots figure significantly into the value propositions of organizations across most industries — consequently robotic operating systems grew 10x in the last 5 years and will grow 5x more by 2025.
- Revenue will also boom, with a 10x increase in the next 7 years driven by non-industrial robotics — from $52.7B in 2018 to $500B in 2025.
Most importantly, 80–90% of a robotics company’s time is tied up in building out software infrastructure rather than innovating in robotics. That’s a problem.
The remainder of the post can be viewed here.