Today, we’re thrilled to announce our $200M Series C funding round at a $1B valuation, led by @RoboStrategy and existing investors including @generalcatalyst.
Standard Bots is now America’s largest manufacturer of AI-native industrial robots. Our customers include Sunoco, Lockheed Martin, NASA, and the US Army along with hundreds of other manufacturers across the country. We’re proud to say that we’re on track to deploy 10% of all U.S. industrial robots by next year.
We are expanding our Glen Cove, New York facility to 70,000 square feet to scale our vertically integrated production process. We currently design almost all our own parts, including our own actuators, and we assemble every final product in-house. By 2027, we’ll manufacture everything — from metal in to robots out — right here in America.
We believe AI-native robots are the essential power tool of the 21st century — the tool that will grow American manufacturing and help every American worker to be a force at work. You just show your robot how it’s done, and it learns through demonstration. No coding, no consultants, just unbox and deploy faster than anything else on the market.
Right now it’s possible for the United States to revitalize our manufacturing base if we become the worldwide leader in this transformative technology.
We must build American robots, and put them to work in American factories. It’s a national imperative, and it’s our central mission. This fundraise gets us one step closer to the goal.
The future of American manufacturing is bright! Join Standard Bots, and show your robot how it’s done — we’re just getting started.
Investors are betting billions of dollars that robotics will experience a Giant Leap.
Meaning: robots are not useful today, but throw enough GPUs, models, data, and PhDs at the problem, and you’ll cross some threshold on the other side of which you will meet robots that can walk into any room and do whatever they’re told.
The Giant Leap view is sexy. It holds the promise of a totally unbounded market – labor today is a ~$25 trillion market, constrained by the cost and unreliability of humans; if robots become cheap, general, and autonomous, the argument goes that you get Jevons Paradox for labor - available to whichever team of geniuses in a garage produces the big breakthrough first. This is the type of innovation that Silicon Valley loves. Brilliant minds love opportunities where success is just a brilliant idea away.
My friend @evanbeard is betting that progress will happen by climbing the gradient of variability. That robotics will progress towards general usefulness in small steps.
The logic is clear:
- Robotics is bottlenecked on data.
- The best data is the data your robots collect actually doing things.
- The best strategy, then, even if it's not the sexiest, is to get paid to collect that data, learn, and iterate.
This is where the vast majority of value lies, and the real path to our abundant robotic future.
For the first co-written essay in not boring world, Evan and I write about the robots.
Had a dream where I went back in time and told myself the best part of the future was that if you get soaked on the way to work you can prime now a dry pair of pants in under an hour.