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The Foxglove Studio acts as an IDE for robotics. | Source: Foxglove

Foxglove, a company creating flexible, user-extensible and fully integrated developer tools for the robotics industry, announced $3.7 million in seed funding.

The company began as a branch of Webviz, a browser-based visualization tool developed at Cruise. Cruise open sourced the tool in 2019. Foxglove’s founders, Adrian Macneil and Roman Shtylman, noticed in their time at Cruise how few off-the-shelf tooling existed for robotics.

For many robotics companies, all tooling needs to be made in house, which can be expensive and time consuming. Foxglove was founded to fill in this gap and create robotics development tools that could help accelerate robotics development.

The company currently has two product offerings. The first is Foxglove Studio, an open source visualization and debugging platform. The studio comes with ROS 2 support and an extension API.

“Foxglove has helped streamline our development efforts, providing an integrated visualization and debugging solution for our NVIDIA DRIVE autonomous vehicle platform,” Nicolas Koumchatzky, senior director of AI infrastructure at NVIDIA, said. “With Foxglove, we’re able to visualize vehicle data, design custom layouts from common workflows, and integrate with our data lake for faster browser-based debugging.”

The Foxglove Data Platform is designed to be a one-stop shop for storing your data. | Source: Foxglove

Its newest product offering is Foxglove Data Platform, a data managing solution for roboticists. This product is aimed at the lack of data management options for robotics, as existing solutions typically couldn’t handle the large amounts of data typical in robotics. Some roboticists have resorted to simply passing around external hard drives for collaboration.

The seed funding is led by Amplify Partners and has participation from many within the industry, like Kyle Vogt, co-founder and CTO of Cruise, Dr. Pieter Abbeel, professor at UC Berkeley, Adam Draper, founder and managing director of Boost VC, and Karri Saarinen, CEO of Linear.

“Developer productivity at Cruise is critical to enabling our progress towards a driverless future,” Vogt said. “I’m excited to see Foxglove help the next generation of robotics startups bring innovative products to market faster.”

The company hopes to use the funding to expand its extensions API, add support for additional robotics frameworks and launch more features in the Foxglove Data Platform.