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. A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE: Support its mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE's Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities. * 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more * 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni - Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network Are you an AWS customer? Support SiliconANGLE financially by buying your AWS services from its Marketplace portal page and links: https://siliconangle.com/aws-marketplace/. About SiliconANGLE Media. SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation, uniting breakthrough technology, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios - with flagship locations in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange - SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology and AI. Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Its new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.

Tutor Intelligence, the robotics research and deployment company, today announced its $75 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing the company’s...

Tutor Intelligence raises Series B to scale model training, robot deployments. Real-world data, human "tutors," and simulation are all part of the recipe for training AI models to enable next-generation robots to tackle a widening variety of tasks. Tutor Intelligence Inc. today said it has raised $75 million in Series B funding as it works toward general-purpose robotics. "It's not only that Tutor's models let robots do jobs that robots have never been able to do before," stated Josh Gruenstein, co-founder and CEO of Tutor Intelligence. "This type of intelligence also makes robots affordable on a whole new level. We're unlocking much broader access to the solutions that businesses need to survive and that make basic goods cheaper for everybody. And the demand is there. We can hardly build robots fast enough." Tutor Intelligence spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) in 2021. The Watertown, Mass.-based company asserted that it is building a full technology stack to "close the gap between what robots can do and what people can do." Data flywheel accelerates robot deployment. "Artificial intelligence has transformed the digital world, learning to converse and code from the internet's vast record of text and images," said Tutor Intelligence. "The physical world has no such record to train on, and AI has yet to transform it in the same way." The company has deployed fleets of internet-connected robots into production environments, where they do real work for customers with input from remote operators known as "tutors." It uses the real-world data to train better frontier models, ultimately making the robots more capable. Tutor claimed that its "full-stack platform" and "data flywheel" accelerate deployment, making robots more scalable, safer, and more affordable. Instead of a robots-as-a-service (RaaS) model, business pay Tutor by the hour or by the pick, the same way they pay for manual labor. Customers make no upfront purchase and sign no long-term contract, added Tutor. The company said it handles deployment and maintenance and regularly sends software and intelligence upgrades. Tutor said its approach is bringing automation to tasks that have long defied conventional, deterministic robotics. It opened a "Data Factory" earlier this year to evaluate policies across 100 physical robots. Submit your innovation now! Tutor Intelligence gets traction with Sonny and Cassie. Tutor's Data Factory includes the Sonny two-armed, semi-humanoid robots for each picking. Cassie is a mobile manipulator designed for case picking and palletizing. The company reported that twice as many of its robots are working in almost four times as many facilities as a year ago. It said it is on track to have more than 1,000 robots under contract by the end of 2027, all of which will be built in and deployed from the U.S. (The tutors may be overseas.) The robots are currently moving, lifting, and manipulating objects across some of the country's largest manufacturing and logistics networks. They handle breakfast cereals, snacks, candy, cosmetics, home goods, toys, and more. Tutor noted that its growth reflects maturing enterprise adoption of physical AI, as companies move from pilots to expectations of a return on investment from automating their operations. Nearly a third of organizations that received Tutor robots in the past 12 months were existing customers installing more robots, it said. Funding to support more training and manufacturing. Andreessen Horowitz led Tutor Intelligence's Series B round, which brings its total capital raised to $117 million. Union Square Ventures and Neo, which led the company's Series A and seed rounds, respectively, also participated. "Tutor's insight is that deployment isn't just the destination for robotics research - it's how you overcome its limitations," said Raghu Raghuram, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and former CEO of VMware. "Rather than asking the real world to fit the research, Tutor starts with what real-world deployments demand and works backward through distribution, hardware and research," he added. "Continual learning across an expanding range of deployments is the path from specialized capabilities to general-purpose robotics." Tutor said its latest investment its frontier robot foundation model training, as well as manufacturing and deployment of Sonny and Cassie. It announced the latest models of its robots and underlying platform last month.