Ontario-based industrial robot maker Clearpath Robotics announced today that it had raised CAD 14 million (about $11.1 million USD) today in a Series A round. RRE Ventures is leading the round and iNovia Capital is also participating.
Clearpath was founded by a group of friends from a robotics competition team at the University of Waterloo who banded together to found the company largely because the economic climate of the time didn’t leave them much choice.
“Things were bad and there were just not a lot of robotics jobs out there,” CEO and cofounder Matt Rendall told me.
The company was not an idle enterprise, however. Customer focused from the get-go, it received five purchase orders from companies involved in robotics research before they even built their first robot. That let to the company’s first angel round in 2010 for $360,000, which was capital geared towards simply delivering their purchase orders. The founders haven’t looked back since.
“We broke even in 18 months,” Rendall told me. “And we’ve been growing aggressively ever since.
So why raise money now? The answer’s simple, Rendall said: they’re not alone anymore.
“The market is heating up,” Rendall said. “People are paying attention and acquisitions are happening. We have a couple of years’ headstart on the market, but because the velocity is picking up, we need to add fuel to the fire.”
The majority of the funding being raised in this round is to hire developers and engineers so that the company can bring newer products to market. Currently, the company develops most of its line of autonomous vehicles and robots for researchers. Now, though, they want to break new ground.
“Our expansion is geared towards building specific robots for specific applications,” Rendall said. “We want to do manufacturing. We’re also seeing interest in mining as well.”
In addition to its focus on expanding its business, the company is also concerned about the direction of the industry as a whole. Last year, Clearpath joined the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a group of activists working for policies to prevent the production of autonomous devices that are able to fire weapons without human intervention.
As part of that, the company made a pledge that it would not play any role in the development of autonomous weaponized devices.
“There are no technical impediments to building killer robots,” Rendall told me. “Only policy can stop it. So we made the decision to put our stick in the ground and say ‘This is the line we will not cross.’ We hoped that if we put it out there, we’d get people talking about it.”
http://www.forbes.com/
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