Foxglove, a San Francisco-based startup building a data and observability platform for robotics companies, today said it has raised $40 million in Series B funding. The company has now raised more than $58 million since its 2021 founding.
Co-founders Adrian Macneil and Roman Shtylman previously worked at Cruise and built a similar tool for the autonomous vehicle company. While at Cruise, they realized how few off-the-shelf development tools existed for robotics companies and decided to launch Foxglove.
Foxglove builds data and visualization tools that help robotics developers collect, analyze, and learn from the sensor data that their robots generate. The company‘s stated goal is to help build and deploy more reliable robots.
Foxglove builds infrastructure to accelerate development
Foxglove is working to bring the kind of in-house data infrastructure used by companies like Waymo and Tesla to the broader robotics industry without the need for hundreds of engineers.
“Our vision is to build the data stack and ML [machine learning] platform that every other robotics startup can use, so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” Macneil said. “We want to help every robotics company move faster.”
Foxglove’s platform is used by customers such as Amazon, Anduril, Chef Robotics, Dexterity, NVIDIA, Shield AI, and a number of autonomous vehicle and humanoid robot companies.
One of the more interesting customer uses, Macneil said, was Foxglove’s partnership with Shield AI. It initially used Foxglove internally but later embedded the tools into its HiveMind autonomy stack, making Foxglove part of the software development kit (SDK) that Shield’s own customers use.
“That was a really interesting milestone,” Macneil said. “It showed that we’re not just a developer tool, but core infrastructure for other platforms.”
Foxglove was featured in The Robot Report’s inaugural Startup Radar, which highlights 100 robotics startups five years or younger.
The Startup Radar 2025 includes data on each company’s market focus, size, funding, products and more. Download the Startup Radar 2025 to discover who’s building the next generation of robotics.
Dexterity saves 20% in tooling time
Dexterity, a leading logistics robotics company, estimated that the Foxglove platform has saved it more than 20% in development time and $150,000 annually in tooling and development time.
Before integrating Foxglove, Dexterity relied on in-house tools and various log analyzers. These tools met the basic requirements, but they required constant maintenance and lacked rich visualization capabilities essential for efficient debugging and development. The inability to record or replay visualizations and data resulted in significant time wasted, developer friction, and the need to juggle multiple disparate tools.
“We expected [the Foxglove platform to just offer] easier visualization, but it turned out to be much more, unlocking invaluable efficiency for all our developers,” said Dexterity founding engineer Robert Sun.
A Digit humanoid robot from Agility Robotics visualized with Foxglove. Source: Foxglove
Investors give a vote of confidence
Bessemer Venture Partners led Foxglove’s Series B round, with participation from existing investors Eclipse and Amplify Partners. Foxglove said the round is a vote of investor confidence at a time when many robotics companies are struggling to raise capital.
Macneil said Foxglove’s broad customer base and horizontal platform make it more resilient than if it were tied to a single category of robotics. The funding will allow Foxglove to expand its 50-person team, half of which are engineers, and accelerate product development.
“If you go to a Tesla or a Waymo, there are literally hundreds of people building this kind of tooling inside those companies,” said Macneil. “We want to bring that quality of infrastructure to the rest of the robotics industry.”
Macneil compared today’s robotics infrastructure landscape to the early days of cloud computing. “In the 2000s, the big internet companies — Google, Amazon, Facebook — built their own infrastructure,” he said. “Then came companies like AWS, Datadog, and Twilio that turned that internal infrastructure into developer platforms. We’re doing the same thing for robotics.”
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