It was a time of truth for Amazon. After years of work, many acquisitions and millions spent, could the retail giant's investment in automation help keep things running? Yes, the answer was very clear. The company's deployment of hundreds of thousands of robotic systems across American fulfillment centers has become a gold standard for industrial automation.
Brad Porter decided to leave Amazon in August 2020 after 13 years of rising in the ranks. The executive mentioned that he wanted to be closer to his wife's relatives in the Bay Area as a factor. Porter launched his own venture in March after spending 2 years as the CTO of Scale.
The project, which has been listed as "more to come" on his profile, comes out of stealth today, with a $10 million raise, led by Neo and featuring a number of companies. The brand-new startup, based in Santa Clara, California, has a very simple name and URL, co.bot.
The HRI is at the center of the company's mission, according to both. The six-degrees-of-freedom robotic arm is the closest industrial robot to a universal and versatile piece of hardware, according to Porter.
Porter said on the call that there isn't an equivalent capability to the six-degree-of-freedom robotic art that works with humans. We are going to start a company to build that.
Collaborative isn't ready to discuss what a piece of hardware might look like just yet. It definitely won't look like a robot from the upcoming movie.
Porter doesn't want to talk more about the company than the robot If you have a Musk bot on one end of the spectrum, and a low-profile AMR on the other, we think you have a pretty good idea of what it is. We don't think theTeslaBots are easy to use.
Microfulfillment, in which warehouses are closer to consumers for faster delivery, is becoming an increasingly important topic as companies look to compete against Amazon.
Porter says that Amazon has an advantage over other companies. We could modify the process paths around the robots. I think we need something that is more flexible, that can go into odd shaped buildings without a lot of infrastructure.
Collaborative refers to the funding as a seed round, though Porter's involvement certainly brings some clout out of the gate. The $10 million will be used to increase the head count to 20 to 25 engineers.
Brad has a track record of building great teams and moving quickly to seize opportunities at large tech companies and Silicon Valley startup. Collaborative Robotics is an example of an industry veteran with a vision to recognize a huge opportunity and assemble a world class team to go after it.
Locus, Symbotic, and Zebra/Fetch are just a few of the large players in the fulfillment category.
It was the experience of having seen almost everything that made us develop the concept. There are a lot of movements of human-scale things from place to place. There isn't a robotic system that can do that.
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