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Swiss-Mile’s wheeled quadruped can be utilized in safety, development, logistics and extra. | Supply: Swiss-Mile
Swiss-Mile has raised $22 million in seed funding for its wheeled quadruped. The robotic relies on ANYbotics’ ANYmal quadruped. Each ANYbotics and Swiss-Mile spun out of ETH Zurich.
The wheels on Swiss-Mile’s quadruped differentiates it from extra conventional quadrupeds like Boston Dynamics‘ Spot or Unitree‘s Go2. The corporate stated it has spent the final 12 months working pilots for purchasers, together with last-mile supply in good cities and safety for vital infrastructure.
Swiss-Mile stated its quadrupeds can stroll, drive, and stand upright on two legs and manipulate packages with wheeled finish effectors.
“The Swiss-Mile staff is constructing progressive actual world-oriented options using embodied AI and robotics, bringing their experience to numerous industries,” stated Franziska Bossart, Head of the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, an investor within the spherical. “We on the Industrial Innovation Fund are delighted to help their staff, recognizing the potential these applied sciences maintain for Amazon.”
Jeff Bezos, by way of the Bezos Expeditions, and HongShan led the funding spherical. The funding additionally included participation from Armada Funding.
Inside Swiss-Mile’s embodied AI
Swiss-Mile stated embodied AI is the cornerstone of its robotic. The firm built-in reinforcement and supervised studying right into a unified framework, enabling its robots to autonomously be taught from scratch and adapt based mostly on real-world deployments. Swiss-Mile stated this method permits it to generate and scale novel robotic behaviors, regularly refining them by way of information collected from each real-world environments and artificial situations.
“What excites me most about Swiss-Mile is their worldwide and customer-centric mindset from the very starting,” stated Harry Wang, founder and CEO of Linear Capital. “They are going to have the ability to leverage their world assets to make Swiss-Mile a number one energy within the subsequent wave of bodily AI revolution.”
Amazon’s current investments
Because it was launched in 2022, the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund has invested in plenty of robotics startups. Its early investments included Agility Robotics, Bionic Hive, and Mantis Robotics.
Extra not too long ago, the fund led Instock’s seed spherical. Instock affords an ASRS that makes use of modular racking and a singular cell robotic that may drive the wrong way up on the racks. These robots carry bins horizontally and transfer on the partitions and ceiling by gripping the bin wings, giving the AMRs more room to move and gather bins, it stated. Instock gained a 2024 RBR50 Robotics Innovation Award.
Amazon’s Industrial Innovation Fund is a $1 billion company enterprise capital fund. It goals to help rising expertise firms by way of direct investments.