Flexiv brings in nearly $100M investment

Flexiv’s Rizon 10 adaptive robot. | Source: Flexiv

A spokesperson from the company confirmed that Flexiv closed a Series B+ funding round with an investment of nearly $100 million. According to the company, the latest investment makes the company a unicorn startup.

Flexiv spun out of Stanford University in 2016. It was founded by Shiquan Wang, now the CEO, Xiyang Yeh, now the CTO, and Shuyun Chung, now the chief robotics scientist. In 2020, Flexiv brought in over $100 million in a Series B round of funding, and it brought in $22 million in Series A funding in 2019.

The company plans to use the latest round of funding to further develop general purpose robotics software, expand in the market and grow Flexiv’s robotic ecosystem. It did not disclose the investors in the round.

Flexiv launched its Rizon adaptive robot in April 2019, and today it offers three different Rizon models, the original Rizon 4, the Rizon 4s and the Rizon 10. The core features of these adaptive robots include high-precision and fast-response force-controlled technology throughout the arm.

Since 2021, Flexiv has begun releasing robotics software platforms, including Noema, an artificial intelligence (AI) system, and the Flexiv RDK (robot development kit).

Noema is a general-purpose AI system that acts as an intelligent robotic brain that is cloud-edge-end adapted for all industries, according to the company. It comes with a number of integrated algorithms, like complex pose estimation, force perception fusion, a general grasp algorithm and human analysis.

The Flexiv RDK was created to make the complex robot development process simple. It has easy to use drag-and-drop visual programming, with a user-friendly human-robot interface. It has an embedded advanced semi-autonomous programming module and supports WLAN connect and one-to-many configuration.

Flexiv currently has offices in Silicon Valley, Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Foshan, Taiwan and Singapore. Its robotic offering can be used in general assembly, surface treatment, precise manipulation, mobile operation and more.