Sequoia
Assembly Line
Robco links up with $14M led by Sequoia to bring modular robotics to industrial SMBs
Robco, a Munich-based startup that has built a platform for designing low-cost modular robots for small and medium industrial businesses, has picked up €13 million (about $13.8 million). The round — a Series A — is led by Sequoia, with Kindred Capital, Promus Ventures and Torsten Reil, Christian Reber and Daniel Dines all also investing.
Even with the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been poured into a variety of industrial automation and robotics companies over recent years (and some of the very notable failures that have inevitably come out of that) Robco believes that it has found a niche in the market by focusing on tricky tasks and building cost-effective solutions to address the needs of smaller manufacturers. In short, SMBs might need to scale up productivity at times but — either due to the economics of the need, or labor shortages, or both — are unable to hire people to fill those jobs on a permanent basis. This is an area that those making larger machines for bigger industrial clients had yet to address, he said.