Viam maintains excessive ranges of safety for its prospects, their machines, and information saved within the cloud. | Credit score: Viam
Viam AI secured a $30 million Sequence C spherical, led by present investor Union Sq. Ventures, with participation from Battery Ventures and Italian funding group Neurone. The spherical brings Viam’s complete quantity raised to $117 million since its founding in 2020.
The Viam platform operates throughout a number of domains, together with robotics, IoT, sensible house purposes, and manufacturing unit automation. It helps numerous use circumstances, from monitoring to full automation. It additionally helps corporations with out massive engineering groups implement superior applied sciences.
Viam was a 2023 RBR50 honoree for the innovation of growing an open-source robotic structure with an built-in cloud service. The corporate’s roots are within the growth of enterprise-scale cloud providers, and the corporate was one of many first to combine these cloud providers with an open-source robotics growth setting.
CEO Eliot Horowitz, as a co-founder of MongoDB, brings a wealth of expertise in growing safe, net purposes. Viam was designed from the bottom as much as be a web-connected, open supply, plug and play ecosystem. This allows {hardware} builders, together with robotics corporations, to concentrate on mechanical design, after which leverage hardened software program for cloud-based purposes, with out ranging from scratch. One robotics buyer utilizing Viam is Tennibot.
Tennibot Rover is a robotic tennis ball collector designed to assist tennis gamers prepare. | Credit score: Tennibot/Viam
Tennibot, a developer of a novel tennis and pickle ball coaching robotic, makes use of Viam software program to combine fleet administration, distant operations and preventative upkeep. With the Viam cloud providers, the corporate can collect ongoing information from the sphere and use this information to coach new AI capabilities. Leveraging the Viam platform supplied Tennibot with the instruments to deal with their machine fleet and information administration challenges.
Attendees of the upcoming Robotics Summit & Expo can play pickleball on the expo ground with the assistance of Tennibot. The Robotics Summit takes place April 30-Might 1 in Boston and can entice 5,000+ attendees from the business robotics growth ecosystem.
Viam begins international growth
Viam plans to make use of the brand new funds to assist gasoline international growth. A kind of worldwide markets is Italy, the place Viam is working with investor Neurone to develop its presence.
“There’s numerous nice industrial corporations in Italy which can be doing actually attention-grabbing issues, the place they wish to be revolutionary and transfer rapidly,” Horowitz informed The Robotic Report. “So there’s an enormous curiosity in iterating rapidly and bringing in the most effective new know-how in Italy proper now.”
He’s additionally bullish on alternatives particularly in Norway, and the remainder of Europe, the place he stated Viam can simplify the advanced technical challenges of constructing and scaling robotic and IoT options.
In response to Horowitz, the platform additionally contains APIs and plugins for dealing with funds securely, which permits all forms of enterprise fashions that may observe tools utilization or different optionally available providers. These are the forms of capabilities {that a} younger startup would possibly take into account constructing from scratch, or try to hack collectively if not utilizing Viam.
Viam’s platform is totally suitable with ROS. | Credit score: Viam
Horowitz described Tennibot’s journey this fashion: “The attention-grabbing factor about Tennibot is that they’d constructed a totally ROS system earlier than, after which wanted options and issues that ROS didn’t embody. Now they’re taking stuff out of ROS and utilizing Viam. One of many nice issues about Viam is how pluggable it’s. You don’t have to fret about it, and you’ll slowly migrate over time.”