Autonomous vehicles fuel $2.7B funding boom in June 2024. By Dan Kara | July 29, 2024Listen to this article. Forty-eight companies that make robots or relevant enabling technologies raised a total of $2.7 billion in June 2024. At press time, this was the highest monthly funding total of 2024. It exceeded May’s total by more than $500 million and was more than double the 12-month trailing investments average of $1.3 billion. Robotics investments for the first six months of 2024 totaled about $8.4 billion

Decrypt’s Art, Fashion, and Entertainment Hub. Discover SCENEWhile workers fret over whether AI and robotics will eliminate their jobs, Los Angeles-based GrayMatter Robotics sees a different, and more immediate, challenge: too much work for too few people.“Sometimes for these manufacturers in this application domain, the labor shortage is as high as 75%,” GrayMatter Robotics CEO Ariyan Kabir told Decrypt during a tour of its facility.The reason for the shortage is a laudable one, he noted, as the shortage of people entering the manufacturing industry shows an increase in the standard of living and technology, giving people the option to take less physically demanding jobs.“That's where we are focusing on augmenting the workforce,” Kabir said. “The applications that we're focusing on, there's not enough people to do this in the first place.”ADADTo expand its operations and accelerate hiring, GrayMatter announced on Thursday that it had raised $45 million in Series B funding.With Generative AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude AI surging into the mainstream, businesses everywhere are looking for ways to leverage the emerging technology. GrayMatter Robotics was among them.Founded in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic by USC Alums S.K. Gupta, Brual Shah, and Kabir, GrayMatter designs and produces autonomous robotic arms and also develops artificial intelligence models to program them.“[2020] was not the best time to start a business, we have been very fortunate,” Kabir said. “We started GrayMatter for two reasons: to help millions of people improve their quality of lives, and to help our economy.”ADADA GrayMatter Robotics arm at work

GrayMatter Robotics, a Los Angeles, CA-based robotics company delivering autonomous robotic solutions, raised $45M in Series B funding