Micropsi Industries, a robotics software company founded in 2014, closed $6.08 million in Series A funding. The funding was led by Project A, a leading Berlin-based investor with more than €260 million in assets under its management. Previous investors Coparion and Vito Ventures as well as experienced business angels also participated in this round. Micropsi raised a $2.5 million seed round in June 2017.
The funding will be used to launch Micropsi Industries’ artificial intelligence technology in the U.S. and Europe. The company develops AI systems, including Mirai, its software stack for sensor-driven robot control. Using a controller box, camera and sensors, Mirai enables robot arms to learn skills that would be hard or impossible to hand-engineer, greatly expanding the existing application possibilities of industrial robots.
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Mirai learns movements that are intuitive for humans but challenging for robots, by using imitation and transfer learning to pick up knowledge of motions from humans. With Mirai, industrial robots can now be trained to handle complex tasks in days instead of weeks via programming – enabling a robot to operate in unstructured and unpredictable environments, fast and cost effectively.
“We are looking forward to bringing our cutting-edge AI technology to the U.S. and European markets so companies can design and deliver more consistent quality in their production systems,” said Ronnie Vuine, founder and CEO, Micropsi Industries. “With Mirai customers can put robots to work in entirely new fields — robots that are trained and not programed, which will save both time and cost.”
According to Markets and Markets, the industrial robotics market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 9.60 percent to $71.72 billion by 2023. Micropsi Industries is poised to leverage this market opportunity by automating various complex and dexterous tasks on the factory floor, such as plugging cables into the right port.
“We believe Micropsi Industries’ disruptive AI technology fills a critical gap in the industrial robotics industry — making it cheaper and faster to deploy and redeploy robots to take on complex movements that might otherwise be impossible,” said Uwe Horstmann, general partner, Project A. “We see enormous market opportunities for the company and are looking forward to supporting the leadership team as they build a great company and expand their footprint, globally.”
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