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 current investor Union Sq. Ventures, with participation from Battery Ventures and Italian funding group Neurone. The spherical brings Viam’s whole quantity raised to $117 million since its founding in 2020.
The Viam platform operates throughout a number of domains, together with robotics, IoT, sensible dwelling purposes, and manufacturing facility automation. It helps various 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 improvement of enterprise-scale cloud providers, and the corporate was one of many first to combine these cloud providers with an open-source robotics improvement 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 permits {hardware} builders, together with robotics corporations, to deal with 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 sector and use this information to coach new AI capabilities. Leveraging the Viam platform supplied Tennibot with the instruments to handle their machine fleet and information administration challenges.
Attendees of the upcoming Robotics Summit & Expo can play pickleball on the expo flooring with the assistance of Tennibot. The Robotics Summit takes place April 30-Might 1 in Boston and can appeal to 5,000+ attendees from the industrial robotics improvement ecosystem.
Viam begins international growth
Viam plans to make use of the brand new funds to assist gas international growth. A type 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 are doing actually attention-grabbing issues, the place they wish to be revolutionary and transfer rapidly,” Horowitz advised The Robotic Report. “So there’s an enormous curiosity in iterating rapidly and bringing in the perfect new know-how in Italy proper now.”
He’s additionally bullish on alternatives particularly in Norway, and the remainder of Europe, the place he mentioned Viam can simplify the complicated technical challenges of constructing and scaling robotic and IoT options.
In keeping with Horowitz, the platform additionally consists of APIs and plugins for dealing with funds securely, which allows all sorts of enterprise fashions that may monitor tools utilization or different non-obligatory providers. These are the sorts of capabilities {that a} younger startup may contemplate constructing from scratch, or try and hack collectively if not utilizing Viam.
Viam’s platform is totally appropriate with ROS. | Credit score: Viam
Horowitz described Tennibot’s journey this fashion: “The attention-grabbing factor about Tennibot is that that they had constructed a completely ROS system earlier than, after which wanted options and issues that ROS didn’t embrace. 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 may slowly migrate over time.”
