Kyle Vogt, then president and CTO of Cruise, delivered a keynote at the 2019 Robotics Summit & Expo.
The Bot Company — led by former Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt — has raised $150 million in new funding, according to Reuters. While the company has yet to reveal a service robot prototype, this latest funding puts its valuation at $2 billion.
The latest funding round includes participation from Greenoaks, a San Francisco-based global investment firm. Its previous funding was led by Nat Friedman, a California-based investor; Daniel Gross, an angel investor in businesses like SpaceX, Stripe, and Instacart; and Nabeel Hyatt, a general partner at Spark Capital. It also included participation from Quiet Capital, Patrick Collison, John Collison, Elad Gil, Fifty Years, and more.
It has been over a year since Vogt publicly launched The Bot Company with $150 million already raised. Paril Jain, chief technology officer and former tech lead and AI manager at Tesla, is a co-founder of the company. Luke Holoubek, an engineer at The Bot Company, is the former technical advisor to the CTO at self-driving car developer Cruise.
Vogt has fundraising, AV experience
Vogt is no stranger to technical and business challenges. He started Cruise in 2013 with Dan Kan. General Motors acquired Cruise for $1 billion in 2016. In November 2023, Vogt left Cruise, saying his plans include spending time with family and “exploring new ideas.”
The resignation came after a difficult few weeks for Cruise. In October 2023, California’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) suspended Cruise’s autonomous vehicle (AV) deployment and driverless testing permits. The DMV said it suspended the permits because of a string of incidents, saying the company “misrepresented” the safety of its robotaxis. More recently, GM officially stopped funding Cruise’s robotaxi deployments.
Vogt’s experience with funding companies didn’t start with Cruise. He was a co-founder of Justin.tv, eventually the parent company of Twitch.tv. In 2014, Amazon purchased Twitch for $970 million.
The Bot Company hopes to automate mundane chores
The Bot Company aims to create home robots that will assist people with everyday tasks. The San Francisco-based startup has remained tight-lipped about what its system will look like or what capabilities it will have, but Reuters said sources indicated that it’s working on a non-humanoid robot equipped with a base and grips.
The Bot Company said it is focusing on automating household chores so people have more time for meaningful pursuits. However, household robotics is a notoriously challenging segment of the robotics market. Unlike in industrial settings, developers of home robots have no certainty about the conditions their robots will have to operate in.
Other home robot developers include 1X Technologies, which recently unveiled the NEO Gamma humanoid as it prepares for pilot deployments in select homes. On the non-humanoid side of things, Hello Robot currently offers Stretch 3, a mobile manipulator to help disabled people gain independence in their homes.
The Bot Company said the latest funding round will help it build out the hardware and artificial intelligence for its household robots. The Robot Report reached out to the company for additional details but did not hear back as of press time.
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