Why We Invested in Viabot: The Future of Autonomous Robots for Commercial Properties

We’re thrilled to announce our investment in ViaBot, a Bay Area industrial machinery company whose flagship product, RUNO, is an autonomous mobile robot designed to perform outdoor commercial tasks, such as sweeping and grass cutting. Welcome, Gregg and ViaBot team, to the Prototype Capital family!

Coming in, we saw a few relevant fundamental truths:

1. One of the most difficult challenges for commercial property owners is maintenance. Over the past few years, the outdoor commercial property industry has seen a massive shift from full-time employees to contractors. This shift in labor has had several negative impacts, including inconsistent work quality and increased logistic issues for property managers.
2. Service robots typically don’t work well in outdoor settings. Currently, most outdoor service robots consume tons of power and require significant teleoperation, minimizing their value and ultimately leading to a slow adoption rate.
3. Most service robots are designed to perform a single function. Given the vast number of tasks that are needed to maintain an outdoor commercial property, it doesn’t seem practical to own a robot that only performs one task. A property owner would need to acquire several robots to complete all the necessary tasks, at which point the economics of acquiring and maintaining the robots no longer makes sense.
4. Outdoor robotic navigation in controlled settings is easier than uncontrolled settings. It’s way easier to do autonomous navigation in a parking lot than it is to do autonomous navigation throughout an entire city, state, or country where there’s a lot of randomness.

We believe ViaBot provides much needed customer solutions while realizing these fundamental truths. Their fully autonomous modular robot can perform several critical outdoor tasks, eliminating the singular and expensive characteristics of most competitive robots, and using computer vision and perception to deliver a solution that is more in line with the multitasking nature of outdoor service work. It’s able to service courtyards and terraces traditional vehicular services cannot. The robot can also swap debris bins when full and change its own batteries, which means it can continue working efficiently 24/7, presenting a game-changing increase in productivity, without the need for teleoperation. We were blown away by the savings ViaBot’s robot can deliver to commercial property owners — realistically as high as 60% savings on their current spend. The software that drives ViaBot’s robots is a critical aspect of their value creation and also positions their products for sustained growth, since they can launch additional tasks and improvements to current tasks over time.

ViaBot is currently running a pilot program on a Bay Area corporate campus serviced by one of the world’s largest real estate companies and has a healthy pipeline of name brand clients.

Ultimately though, our partnership and investment in ViaBot was mainly predicated on the team. Co-founders Gregg Ratanaphanyarat and Dawei Ding met at Penn State while studying Computer Engineering and Industrial Engineering and are now pursuing their vision with ViaBot. The team is made up of impressive individuals who have worked on and won awards on projects from and for companies that include Lockheed Martin, Volvo, and Delphi.

We’re excited to be working with an impressive team to tackle a large and expensive problem for commercial property owners. We look forward to a future where autonomous robots are efficiently and consistently maintaining large commercial properties.

Cheers to a cleaner future,

Team Prototype Capital