Robotics startup Tutor Intelligence nabs $75M investment

Warehouse automation provider Tutor Intelligence Inc. today announced that it has raised $75 million in funding.

Andreessen Horowitz led the Series A investment. It was joined by Union Square Ventures and Neo, which led Tutor’s previous two rounds.

The merchandise that a warehouse processes often arrives on pallets, flat wood structures capable of holding up to several tons. Tutor sells a mobile robotic arm called Cassie that can take packages off a pallet and place them in containers. It’s also capable of performing the opposite operation.

Cassie can process up to 18 items per minute depending on the package type. Its robotic arm is equipped with a vacuum gripper designed to pick up more than 50 pounds. The arm is mounted on a four-wheeled platform that enables Cassie to autonomously travel between different sections of a warehouse.

Automating pallet processing is challenging because the merchandise that a warehouse receives changes over time. Historically, adapting a robotic arm’s workflow to a new item involved manual coding. Cassie uses built-in artificial intelligence models to learn how to pick up new package types automatically.

Tutor also ships its AI models with a second wheeled robot called Sonny. It uses a pair of robotic arms to take items off warehouse shelves and place them in packages. The robot finds the needed items using an array of time-of-flight and stereo cameras. Both camera varieties collect depth data, which makes it easier to determine the distance of an object. 

Tutor plans to apply Sonny to additional use cases in the future. In particular, it sees industrial companies using the system to assemble products and perform equipment maintenance. Tutor teaches Sonny’s AI models new tasks in a facility that hosts more than 100 robots. Human experts demonstrate how to perform a task using a remotely controlled robot and the AI models learn by imitation.

“Sonny’s manufacturability at scale makes it an ideal robot not just for most handwork in manufacturing and logistics, but for arbitrary business-critical applications across the physical economy,” Tutor co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Josh Gruenstein wrote in a blog post. “Data collected by our Sonny fleet trains our largest and most capable robot foundation models at the frontier of rate and reliability.”

Tutor sells its robots under a usage-based pricing model. It removes the need for customers to make a large upfront purchase, which lowers the entry barrier. The company disclosed today that the number of facilities where its robots are used has nearly quadrupled over the past year.

Tutor will use its newly raised funding to enhance its AI models and speed up robot production.

Image: Tutor