Berkeley-based robotics startup Covariant announced the close of a $40 million Series B financing round Wednesday, led by Index Ventures.
The company is actively working toward building universal AI that enables robots to see, reason and interact with the world around them. Its AI in development, aptly named Covariant Brain, helps robots perceive objects in 3D and physically move them.
The technology also includes motion planning that gives robots the ability to, as the company puts it, “learn how to manipulate objects they’ve never seen before, in environments where they’ve never operated.”
“When we founded [the company], our goal was to make AI Robotics work autonomously in the real world,” Pieter Abbeel, Covariant president and co-founder, said in a statement. “Having reached that milestone, we see a huge benefit in expanding our universal AI to new use cases, customer environments and industries.”
Following the latest round, the company is looking to ease the automation process in several new industries. From food distribution to healthcare to e-commerce, Covariant has identified a need for more advanced automation so that these industries can continue to thrive despite the onset of a global pandemic.
“As the coronavirus crisis has exposed serious frailty in the global supply chain, we’re seeing more demand than ever for our AI Robotics solutions,” Peter Chen, Covariant CEO and co-founder, said in a statement. “Our customers are eager to invest in AI and scale it across their supply chains to meet growing demands and more stringent requirements. This latest funding round ... will allow us to scale quickly across multiple industries.”
In addition to its plans for expansion, the company will use the latest financing round to grow its research, engineering and commercial teams.
The company, founded in 2017, has raised a total of $67 million in venture capital to date, according to Crunchbase. Additional investors Radical Ventures and Amplify Partners also participated in Wednesday’s round.
