AI Startups: Ex-Cruise CEO’s Robot Startup Valued at $2 Billion With No Product

The former CEO of Cruise, an autonomous vehicle startup acquired by GM, has raised $150 million for his new robotics startup.

Kyle Vogt co-founded the Bot Company less than a year ago and has raised a total of $300 million. The latest round, led by Greenoaks, would give it a value of $2 billion, according to Reuters.

The previous round, also at $150 million, was funded by Spark Capital, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and others.

The Bot Company is developing artificial intelligence (AI) software and hardware for humanoid robots that can do household tasks. It hasn’t released a product or booked any sales yet.

Robotics are now in fashion in Silicon Valley as large language models are giving robots the capability to understand natural language commands and do complex tasks.

Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics, Meta’s PARTNR, Nvidia’s Isaac Groot N1, Tesla’s Optimus and a slew of AI robotics startups like Figure AI and Cobot are developing humanoid robots that can do general tasks.

The Bot Company was co-founded by Paril Jain and Luke Holoubek, former engineers at Tesla and Cruise, respectively.

Read more: AI-Powered Robots Advance in General Tasks in a Crowded Market

Superintelligence in Science

Lila Sciences, a startup aiming to build a scientific superintelligence platform, has raised $200 million in seed funding.

The company, which came out of the lab of biotech company Flagship Pioneering, will build fully autonomous labs for life, chemical and materials sciences.

Flagship said Lila will “pioneer an advanced form of AI” that can help scientists design and conduct new experiments — generating hypotheses and testing them in real-world environments.

Investors in the round are Flagship Pioneering, General Catalyst, March Capital, ARK Venture Fund, Altitude Life Science Ventures, Blue Horizon Advisors, State of Michigan Retirement System, Modi Ventures and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA).

Lila Sciences CEO Geoffrey von Maltzahn said in a news release that “this is the most important opportunity of our time,” and that the leader in this field will be the entity that runs the scientific method at the largest scale, speed and intelligence. “To achieve this, we must solve the hard problems to allow AI to autonomously and in a scalable manner run each step — from AI models generating an idea to reducing it to practice with robotics and automation,” he said.

Lila’s autonomous science platform combines generative AI with generalizable, scalable and autonomous AI science units to scale and optimize experimentation in any scientific domain.

See also: Report: AI Startup Safe Superintelligence Aims to Quadruple Valuation to $20 Billion

Data Exchange for AI

Carbon Arc has raised $56 million to launch a real-time data exchange for AI model training.

Data is critical to the continued advancement of artificial intelligence models but much of it is locked behind proprietary databases owned by companies. High quality, structured data is particularly valuable. This is data organized in predefined formats, like rows and columns in a spreadsheet or database.

But getting data in a structured, usable format is “nearly impossible,” the startup said in a Thursday (March 20) press release. “Data sources are siloed, inconsistent and locked in slow-moving legacy models.”

Carbon Arc is building an exchange that takes raw data and transforms it into structured data that AI models and businesses can better use. The data will be “traded” on the exchange.

“We’re unlocking private data, turning it into insights, and getting it into the hands of decision-makers who need it,” Co-founder and CEO Kirk McKeown said in the release.

Carbon Arc plans to use the funds raise for further development of its exchange, expand global partnerships, advance AI-powered ontology frameworks, and onboard providers in finance, health care, media and retail.

Read more: Snowflake Plans ‘AI Hub’ and $200 Million in Startup Investments

Crime-Fighting AI Startup

Flock Safety, a startup that provides a safety platform for municipalities to fight crime, has raised $275 million.

The startup provides license plate readers, gunshot detection services, AI-powered video cameras and drones as first responders on its platform, according to a recent news release.

It has partnered with more than 4,800 law enforcement agencies and nearly 1,000 businesses — including four major retailers, seven of the largest U.S. shopping centers and 10 of the biggest U.S. health systems, per the release.

Flock said its technology has been used in cases that include homicides, assaults, human and drug trafficking and organized retail crime.

The round was led by Andreesen Horowitz, with backing from Greenoaks Capital and Bedrock Capital. Also joining were Meritech Capital, Matrix Partners, Sands Capital, Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global, and Y Combinator.

Flock intends to use the capital raised to invest in data intelligence, U.S.-made drones, an interoperable safety ecosystem and U.S. manufacturing.

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