The Bot Company, a robotics startup founded by former co-founder and CEO of Cruise, has raised $150 million in a new funding round led by Greenoaks, according to a Reuters report on March 22, valuing the firm launched less than a year ago at a thumping $2 billion.
Kyle Vogt, the former CEO of self-driving automobile venture Cruise which was later acquired by General Motors, founded The Bot Company along with his co-founders Paril Jain, who led the AI tech team at Tesla, and former Cruise software engineer Luke Holoubek.
“We’re building bots that do chores [household] so you don’t have to,” said Vogt in a LinkedIn post, right around the time he launched the startup.
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The fresh round of funding comes less than a year since Vogt launched The Bot Company, which is aiming to produce a robot focused on household chores.
The startup, launched in May 2024, attained a similar $150 million injection from former GitHub CEO and investor Nat Friedman, Pioneer founder and investor Daniel Gross, Spark Capital General Partner Nabeel Hyatt, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, Stripe Co-Founder John Collison, and Quiet Capital in its initial funding round.
The high investor confidence highlights a growing demand for robotics that overlaps physical AI as tech leaders now tout.
The boom in large language models (LLMs) is significantly boosting interest in robotics, as LLMs enable robots to process natural language commands and perform complex tasks, which could make robots more intuitive and adaptive for use cases at home or on factory floors.
However, at-home robotics is a category where tech giants like Amazon and Meta have already invested significantly. Two other robot startups, Physical Intelligence and 1x, have also raised hundreds of millions to create robots capable of daily household tasks like folding laundry and cleaning countertops.
Likewise, Apptronik secured $403 million in funding backed by investors including Google to scale the production of its AI-powered humanoid robots designed for tasks in warehouses and manufacturing plants.
The timing of The Bot Company’s product launch and revenue is still unknown. This could be due to the challenges of robotics, despite the high demand. Tesla, for example, is paying people $48 an hour to perform tasks in a special suit to train its humanoid, Optimus.
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Ashish Kapoor is acutely aware of all the progress the robotics field has yet to make. For 17 years, he was a leader in Microsoft’s robotics-research department. In 2024, Kapoor founded Scaled Foundations and launched Grid, a robotics-development platform designed for aspiring robot builders.
“No one company can solve the tough problems of robotics alone,” he said.
The Bot Company was launched about five months after Vogt resigned as CEO of Cruise, the autonomous vehicle startup that he founded in 2013 and was later acquired by General Motors. His resignation followed an October 2 incident that saw a Cruise vehicle run over and drag a pedestrian 20 feet, after the pedestrian had been hit by a human-driven car.