The Bot Company Raises $150M for AI-Powered Helpers

Kyle Vogt, former CEO of autonomous vehicle Cruise, secured $150 million in a funding round for his robotics startups, The Bot Company, valuing the firm at $2 billion, according to media reports.

The Bot Company is currently engaged in the development of AI-powered robotic systems designed to provide assistance with domestic responsibilities. While the organization has yet to introduce commercially available products or generate revenue, its pioneering methodology in the areas of automation and robotics has attracted considerable interest.

From Cruise to AI-Powered Robotics

With goal of revolutionizing household automation and addressing the challenges of mundane, repetitive tasks that consume people’s time, its founder, Kyle Vogt, who previously served as the CEO of Cruise, an autonomous vehicle company aimed to apply his expertise in AI and robotics to create smart, practical solutions for daily life.

These AI-powered non-humanoid robots can assist with everyday chores—such as cleaning, organizing, and other household tasks.

The latest round of funding was backed by Greenoaks, a global investment firm based in San Francisco. Previous investors include Nat Friedman, a California-based investor; Daniel Gross, an angel investor in companies such as SpaceX, Stripe, and Instacart; and Nabeel Hyatt, a general partner at Spark Capital. Quiet Capital, Patrick Collison, John Collison, Elad Gil, and Fifty Years also participated in earlier funding rounds.

Despite being at a nascent stage, the startup has successfully garnered faith amongst the investor community and companies. The consensus among researchers is that Large Language Models (LLMs) empower robots to interpret natural language instructions and execute sophisticated operations, thereby enhancing the robots’ intuitiveness and adaptability for domestic and industrial applications.

The Robotics Race

According to a report by Statista, the adoption of collaborative robots or “cobots” is rapidly increasing in the United States Robotics Market. Cobots are designed to operate alongside humans in industrial environments, while there is a growing focus on the development of advanced AI and machine learning capabilities in robotics, which is expected to further drive the growth of this market.

With the advent of this rapid technology in the past few years, humanoid robots have been deployed in various commercial sectors to automate tasks faster with more efficiency.

Recently Google-backed Apptronik announced a Series A funding round of $350 million, increasing the startup’s capacity to produce its Apollo humanoid robots on a larger scale, whereas Tesla continues to refine its Optimus robot to deploy it in the workforce.

Vogt, Paril Jain, and Luke Holoubek, former engineers at Tesla and GM-owned Cruise, co-founded The Bot Company. Right after its launch, in May 2024, the company has raised $150 million from former GitHub CEO and investor Nat Friedman, Pioneer founder and investor Daniel Gross, Spark Capital general partner Nabeel Hyatt, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, Stripe co-founder John Collison and Quiet Capital.

This new venture comes a few months after Kyle resigned from the position of a co-founder and CEO of the popular autonomous vehicle company Cruise, which was later acquired by General Motors.The bot Company is not the only one in the market, while it was spearheaded by a well-known figure like Vogt, there are other companies, which have already successfully secured funding. San Francisco-based Bright Machines, a developer of software and robotics technology for factory manufacturing raised $106 million in Series C funding, plus $20 million in debt, in a BlackRock-led financing, while California-based Figure, which calls itself “AI robotics company bringing a general purpose humanoid to life,” received a funding $675 million.