alt Hacker NewsGermany’s RobCo hits $1B valuation
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"Existing investors including Sequoia, Lightspeed, Greenfield, Kindred, Lingotto and Promus Ventures participated alongside new backers Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective."
What share of the investor money is from USA?
> Robotics-as-a-Service model
Oof. Amazed that venture-backed robotics companies are still interested in making this work.
Is Robert House involved?
What is the SOTA in AI for robotics today? Is there much progress? Or is everybody too much focused on the LLMs now?
First thing that came to mind. I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed.
robotics-as-a-service makes the upfront cost easier, but downtime is still the factory's problem. i'd be more interested in the service contract and recovery time than the valuation.
The comments here are just another reminder of how US-centric HN has become. Whenever there's positive news from Germany or elsewhere in Europe, people are quick to dismiss it. But the moment there's negative news, everyone jumps on the bandwagon to bash it.
I remember few years ago couple of German fintech startups reached more than 1B$ valuation. Had it been the case in US, those startups would have gone IPOs and started expanding worldwide.
However, raising capital in Europe/Germany is so hard. Still majority of the Germans don’t invest their money and just let it depreciate in their savings accounts. Because of that most startups are funded by US venture capitalists. Hope this one would be able to sustain the valuation
What was that US robotics startup that got tons of press like a decade ago for their "human safe" cobot you were supposed to be able to program by just dragging its arm through the motions? It had a goofy LCD face, I want to say the co. was called US Robotics or something but changed their name, all I’m finding is the modem company though.
I’d like my Pip-Boy in matte black please.
really putting on the petal to the metal for reaching 2077
Isn't the $1B unicorn number from like 2015? I feel like that's a pretty typical series A/B valuation at this point.
Coming right up: Belgian Hybrid shower curtain and defense startup Aperture Science raises 780M Euros, while biotech unicorn Umbrella in on the verge of coming out of stealth and releasing a vaccine for cancer.
so the website is basically called it physical AI
Robocop is missing a 'p'. And one 'o'.
Weren't germans so accurate in the past? The AI slop degrades all quality.
I prefer the variant in the movie from 1987.
I was expecting to be disappointed at seeing another humanoid robot that can fold laundry BS startup.
But it looks like they're trying to build something that is actually useful.
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I understand why humans get fixated on the nominal threshold of a large, round number like $1B.
But the thing about private market valuations is that you can't know if investors are right ex ante, so it's helpful to discount.
A $1B valuation sort of just means you now effectively "owe it" to shareholders, and you're now 100% incentivized to deliver that to them in some form, instead of being fully incentivized to deliver on your true vision to your customer.
When done well, private diligence can help uncover blind spots and fund company growth in key areas at the service of that true vision.
When done poorly because of FOMO over AI, robotics, or the latest hype, it can turn into preemptive enshittification.
I'm not sure if the following has any point, really.
First, my father worked as an industrial mechanic in an amazon distribution hub. But he couldn't touch any of the automation. Amazon would bring in German contractors for months at a time to work on the robots, conveyor belts, automation hardware. They made 2.5-3x my father, had 6 weeks vacation, didn't pay for lodging in the US. To me, Amazon's idea of US jobs were the backbreaking labor 'pickers' and 'sorters'.
Second, half my professional career has been in office/factory configurations. Where the engineering offices are glued onto some factory. We're HEAVILY invested in automation. The factory workers are barebones crew designated by union minimums. We have a team of 2-5 people (really, 2 engineers, 3 technicians) who design, build, program, and maintain automated stations. Ranging from a robotic arm picking different components in the correct amounts and putting them in a box, heavy forklift-like robots moving product around, and robotic arms performing some manufacturing task.
What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
Why haven't we hired like 3 junior people to apprentice with the senior guys? They make machines that make money! The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
Maybe I'm wayyyy off the mark, but investing in "US Manufacturing" by importing automation (whether it's from the EU or Asia or anywhere else) probably won't end well and seems like marketing.