Battle of the Bots 👾

Putting whiskers on drones and the VW Bus is back, but electric.

Steph Newton

Published in

Hardware News

5 min readJun 21, 2019

What’s New In Hardware:

Shouldn’t industrial robotics be more accessible to beginners and bit players? A company called Automata says yes. (MIT Technology Review)
Uber is testing drone delivery for integration into its UberEats service in San Diego. (AP News)
Time for a deep dive on a purpose-built wearable for detecting optimum fertility. (IEEE Spectrum)
The climactic fight scene at the end of John Wick 3 was first visualized in VR to help the filmmakers figure out how to actually make it. (Befores & Afters)
Starsky Robotics built an actual trucking company in order to figure out how to make autonomous ones. (TechCrunch)

Offbeat Tidbits You Might’ve Missed:

VW is officially putting its electric minibus concept into actual production. (VW blog)
Putting whiskers on tiny drones would give them sensing abilities on par with technologies they’re literally too small to carry. (IEEE Spectrum)
Drone company DJI is making a foray into the world of ground-based battlebots. (Bless This Stuff)

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Edge Case Research, a six-year-old startup that has created an intelligent safety assessment platform for autonomous vehicle software, has raised $7 million in funding. The round was co-led by Chris Urmson, CEO of Aurora, and ANSYS, a company focused on engineering simulation. Other participants included Lockheed Martin Ventures, Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures, Trucks VC, and Blue Tree Allied Angels.
Lithuanian cubesat builder NanoAvionics, Norwegian ground station operator KSAT, and Belgian satellite hardware specialist Antwerp Spacehave raised $11.3 million to start a satellite constellation for Internet of Things connectivity that would be operated on behalf of a still-to-be-determined service provider. Funding was secured through the European Commission, the European Space Agency, and through private investors.
Sense Photonics, a three-year-old lidar startup based out of San Francisco, has raised $26 million in series A funding. The round was co-led by Acadia Woods and Congruent Ventures, with participation from numerous other investors including Prelude Ventures, Samsung Ventures, and Shell Ventures.
Aurora, a three-year-old self-driving tech company based in Palo Alto, CA has raised an undisclosed total amount of strategic funding from carmaker Hyundai as part of its series B financing. The round initially closed back in February with more than $600 million raised by Sequoia Capital, Hyundai, Baillie Gifford, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.
Mythic, an innovative AI inference processor company with breakthrough analog compute-in-memory technology, has secured $30 million in series B funding. The round was led by Valor Equity Partners, who were joined by new investors Future Ventures, Atreides, Micron Ventures, and Lam Research.
Bounce, a scooter rental startup based in India, has raised $72 million in Series C funding. The round was led by B Capital and Falcon Edge Capital with Chiratae Ventures, Maverick Ventures, Omidyar Network India, Qualcomm Ventures, and existing investors Sequoia Capital India and Accel Partners India also participating.
Helium, a San Francisco-based peer-to-peer wireless network, has raised $15 million in series C funding. The round, which brought total funding to $51M, was co-led by Union Square Ventures and Multicoin Capital, with participation from existing backers Khosla Ventures, GV, FirstMark, and Munich Re Ventures.
Bird, an e-scooter company based out of Santa Monica has acquired San Francisco rival Scoot. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but it’s estimated that the deal consisted of a combination of cash and stock worth around $25 million.
Networking giant Cisco is acquiring French industrial Internet of Things security startup Sentryo in order to optimize visibility, segmentation, and operations for Cisco customers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Intel has signed an agreement to acquire Barefoot Networks, an emerging leader in programmable Ethernet switch hardware and software for use in the data center. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Zume, a robotic pizza delivery and logistics startup, has acquired Pivot Packaging, a maker of plant-based packaging material, for an undisclosed amount. Zume said the deal will enable it to give brands a cost-competitive alternative to plastic.