Mobile Inspection Robot Company Receives Seed Funding
Energy Robotics, a developer of software solutions for mobile inspection robots, has recently received two million euros ($4.4 million) in seed funding.
The round was led by Earlybird, alongside other prominent business angels. Energy Robotics offers the first commercially available software platform that brings together a hardware-independent robot operating system, cloud-based fleet management, and AI-driven data analysis for industrial applications.
The new investment enables the Germany based team to further develop their software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution and expand their product portfolio towards a platform economy and robot-as-a-service. The company is now at the forefront of shaping a transformation triggered by autonomous, intelligent robots.
Earlybird sees great potential in the Darmstadt, Germany based start-up: “The perfectly-coordinated founding team of Energy Robotics combines decades of experience and leading expertise in intelligent autonomous software for mobile robots with visionary entrepreneurship and a “doer” mentality,” says Dr. Andre Retterath, Principal at Earlybird. “The company is growing fast -despite its early stage; the team has already been able to win numerous pilot and license customers such as Shell, Dow Chemical, E.ON and Merck. We are firmly convinced of Energy Robotics’ hardware-independent software approach. It allows the start-up to assemble the best possible fleet of mobile autonomous robots from various third-party vendors for a variety of customer use cases, controlling everything through a common interface and thus scaling optimally at the data processing level.”
Energy Robotics has launched the first commercially available software platform for industrial applications that combines three essential components of intelligent control of mobile autonomous robots: a hardware-independent robot operating system, a cloud-based fleet management, and an AI-powered data analysis. The robots are used for remote inspection and monitoring, especially in industries with harsh and demanding environments such as the oil, gas and petrochemical industries, but also increasingly in the energy and security industries. The company relies on a SaaS model to do this, offering its software solution and associated IT infrastructure along with hardware from various third-party vendors.
“We see our solution as a platform for autonomous remote inspection and monitoring. Our goal is to offer customers our software in combination with the hardware they require, and the robot best suited to their specific use case. In doing so, the platform not only combines different types of robots, but at the same time enables the integration of a variety of apps to perform AI-based analysis of the collected data,” explains Marc Dassler, Co-Founder and CEO of Energy Robotics. “With the newly acquired capital, we are now in a position to grow further and expand our offering and partner network. We are therefore very pleased to have Earlybird and the other investors on our side who see our vision as forward-looking and are promoting it accordingly. For us, it is clear: autonomous robots will significantly change the coming decade, and we are at the forefront of shaping this change.”
With Boston Dynamics and its walking robot Spot, the Darmstadt-based company’s network expanded in September 2020 to include another well-known robot manufacturer. The start of the collaboration was marked by a joint project at the Merck pharmaceutical group in Darmstadt. There, Spot was equipped by Energy Robotics with cameras, sensors and intelligent control software to record inspection data during autonomous inspection tours. In this specific application, the walking robot can read pressure gauges and inspects air outlets.
For more information: www.energy-robotics.com
