ROBO, the first Robotics and Automation ETF, hits $1 billion in AUM

  ( ) surpassed $1 billion in assets under management (AUM) less than 4 years from launch. The Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) tracks the ROBO Global Robotics & Automation Index, which is the brainchild of a team deeply entrenched in the robotics industry.

The Index and subsequent ETF offer investors access to the entire value chain of robotics, automation and artificial intelligence. The ROBO Global Robotics & Automation Index is comprised of 83 global companies from 14 countries in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East and offers almost no overlap with traditional equity indices.

Combined with a growing number of funds in Europe and Asia also tracking the ROBO Global Index, total global AUM is now well over $1.6 billion.

Travis Briggs, CEO of ROBO Global US said: “Our Index was carefully constructed to give our investors diversified access to the large, mid and small-cap companies that are at the forefront of the robotics revolution that is changing the way we consume goods and how companies conduct business.”

According to ETF Strategy, an online financial news portal, and as of July 31st, the fund had returned 10.4% on average per year since inception. North America is the largest geographical weighting in the index with 41% of the weight, followed by Japan with 29%. All other regions have less than a 7% weight in the index. In terms of company size, 51% of the index is made up of mid-cap companies, 26% is made up of small-cap companies and 23% is comprised of large-cap companies.

The team of advisers includes recently added researcher and robotics pioneer Ken Goldberg, Ph.D., the William S. Floyd Distinguished Chair of Engineering at UC Berkeley. Inaddition to being a professor and the Department Chair of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, Goldberg is also Director of the CITRIS “People and Robots” Initiative and the UC Berkeley AUTOLAB. In that capacity, he leads research in geometric algorithms and machine learning for robotics and in applications from surgery to manufacturing.

Other members of the advisory board include:

• Henrik Christensen, PhD, director of UC San Diego Contextual Robotics Institute, founder of the European Network of Excellence in Robotics that included more than 200 universities and lead coordinator for the US Roadmap for Robotics initially released in 2009
• Raffaello D’Andrea, Phd, Professor of Dynamic Systems and Control at ETH Zurich, and co-founder of Kiva Systems, now operating as Amazon Robotics
• Manish Kothari, PhD, president of SRI Ventures and vice president of SRI International
• Wyatt Newman, PhD, Professor at Case Western Reserve University in the areas of mechatronics, robotics and computational intelligence
• Luis-Vincent Gave, author and founder of GaveKal Research where he oversees GaveKal’s money management business as well as contributing to the firm’s research
• Frank Tobe is Executive Editor of The Robot Report, a web-based resource for news and links about the business of robotics, and a co-founder of ROBO-Global.
• Morten Paulsen, Head of Research and a Managing Director at CLSA Japan where he covers the Asian robotics and machinery industry as a Tokyo based equity analyst