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.
So Josh put together a team — a tight-knit, all-star cast of robotics nerds from MIT, serial entrepreneurs, and SaaS veterans — and created Freedom Robotics. Sitting down with Josh, Hans, Dimitri, Alex and Jonathan it doesn’t take long to figure out that they are on to something special. They complement each other wonderfully, but more than that, they possess a type of passion and enthusiasm that is totally infectious.
Then he asked us to invest. My partner at GCVC, Maggie, is not easily impressed. Yet, with her hunt to find a reason to decline exhausted and virtually all metrics we evaluate startups by exceeded, we agreed to proceed. We believe so much in their ability to execute on their mission to be the AWS for robotics that we said yes again, participating in this latest round led by Initialized Capital.
We’re excited by what the future holds for Freedom Robotics. In a short period of time they have built a product that is far and way better than anything in the market that we (and more importantly, their customers) have seen. The data, insight and control their dashboard provides enterprises at scale enables the market to build and manage robotic fleets like never before.
Green Cow Venture Capital looks forward to continuing to support the Freedom Robotics team in their effort to help enterprises bring innovative robotics solutions to market at a fraction of the price.
Read the full press release here.
Are you a robotics founder, developer or team-lead? We think you deserve the best tools. Try out their advanced tooling at Freedom Robotics.
