Cobalt Robotics Raises $13M Series A — Promus Ventures Backstory
Sequoia leads round alongside Promus Ventures, Founders Fund, Storm Ventures and Bloomberg Beta
San Francisco-based Cobalt Robotics recently announced its $13M Series A round led by Sequoia. Promus Ventures led Cobalt’s seed round with Bloomberg Beta in early 2016.
We were first introduced to Travis Deyle by a talented founder that Promus Ventures had earlier backed and led his seed round. Travis graduated with a PhD in Electrical Engineering concentrating on Robotics at Georgia Tech as well as a Senior Hardware Engineer at Google[x] Life Sciences. Along with cofounder Erik Schluntz (Harvard EE, SpaceX), the two set out to build a robot-enabled security service to complement humans in order to keep facilities and offices secure.
Their passion to build robots that could interact with other humans was strong. The team partnered with Yves Behar early to design their robots with a personal touch with which humans could interact. Through their early (rough) prototypes, it was clear that Travis and Erik were building robots with a different feel and touch that was central to their vision to succeed within the security services industry.
Today, Cobalt has proven their platform with several companies in San Francisco. With this new round, Cobalt will be expanding to new cities and extending their engineering and operations teams. We believe it is early days in watching robots change not only this security services industry, but many other verticals that we are seeing play out.
At Promus Ventures, we are software investors that are not shy about investing in deep tech and hardware. In addition to Cobalt Robotics, other notable hardware investments within our 60+ startup portfolio include Marble, Swift Navigation, Rocket Lab, Bellabeat, Whoop, Spire, June, Gauss Surgical, Halter, and other stealth investments not yet announced.
We are excited to continue to invest in and work with great hardware founders and teams such as Cobalt Robotics!
Cobalt’s Series A announcement can be found here. Other Cobalt Series A coverage: CNBC, Silicon Valley Business Journal, PE Hub Network and Tech Startups.
