Full-Time
Software Engineer
Perception
Watney
11-50 employees
Autonomous robotics for datacenter infrastructure maintenance
No salary listed
San Francisco, CA, USA
In Person
 Software Engineering (1) |
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- Experience building high-throughput data platforms, large-scale distributed streaming systems, or infrastructure for autonomous robotics.
- Experience designing scalable data pipelines and storage solutions for heavy multimodal media formats, including high-frame-rate video and unstructured telemetry.
- Experience building closed-loop testing infrastructure, regression frameworks, or automated metric-tracking engines for complex, non-deterministic software systems.
- Technical competency in geometric computer vision fundamentals, 3D spatial data handling, or metadata orchestration for machine learning workflows.
- Architect and optimize scalable off-robot data pipelines that ingest, parse, and manage petabyte-scale video and sensor streams for auto-annotation and localization tasks.
- Design and implement deterministic simulation, regression testing, and evaluation loops to benchmark perception performance before edge deployment.
- Develop high-throughput pipelines that orchestrate multimodal data fusion, automated labeling, and feature extraction to mine training examples from field data.
- Establish end-to-end telemetry systems and observability frameworks to track model regression, data drift, and perception accuracy across live operational environments.
Watney builds autonomous robotic systems that maintain and operate datacenter and supercomputing infrastructure for hyperscalers. The robots perform physical maintenance and monitoring tasks, either teleoperated or autonomous, across large-scale facilities, reducing the need for human presence. The technology uses high-performance runtimes, low-latency cross-continental control, and robust inference to coordinate dexterous robots. Its goal is to enable significant compute scaling by removing manual workload and plugging automation into complex infrastructure, differentiating itself by targeting cloud-scale operators rather than consumer robotics.
Company Size
11-50
Company Stage
N/A
Total Funding
N/A
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
Founded
2023
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Watney raised $21 million seed funding in 2025 from Conviction, Abstract, and A*.
- It is hiring teleoperation, deployment, and robotics roles in San Francisco during 2026.
- Datacenter labor shortages and breakfix demand directly support automation budgets from hyperscalers.
What critics are saying
- Watney has one cited use case; hyperscaler concentration makes any contract loss existential by 2027.
- Seed-stage execution risk stays high until production fleets replace prototypes and narrow demos.
- Competitors can copy datacenter robotics claims faster than Watney proves durable reliability at scale.
What makes Watney unique
- Watney sells autonomous robotics for datacenter buildout and breakfix, not general-purpose warehouse automation.
- Its pitch combines teleoperation, dexterous manipulation, and low-latency control across thousands of miles.
- Watney claims months-long deployments without failure and a live 7,000-mile teleoperated robot fleet.
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Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
↑ 5%1 year growth
↑ 5%2 year growth
↑ 18%Ex-Google and NVIDIA roboticist raises $5M for AI data centre repair robots. August 4, 2026 * Exclaim Robotics has emerged from stealth with $4.95 million in seed funding, co-led by Playfair Capital and Founderful, to develop AI robots for automating data centre maintenance. * Founder Helen Oleynikova left ETH Zürich in January 2026 to build Exclaim full-time. * The Swiss startup aims to reduce labour-intensive maintenance, improve operational efficiency and strengthen Europe's growing robotics ecosystem. A Zurich robotics startup wants a robot, not a person, to open the next live AI server rack. Exclaim Robotics has come out of stealth with $4.95 million in pre-seed funding, co-led by Playfair Capital and Founderful, to build machines that do the maintenance work data centre operators increasingly can't send a human to do. The fresh capital will accelerate development of its robotic platform as data centre operators seek new ways to improve efficiency, reduce costs and minimise manual maintenance. The founder and the robot. Helen Oleynikova founded Exclaim after 15 years in robotics at Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Willow Garage and ETH Zürich, where she co-created nvblox, a 3D mapping and collision-avoidance tool now built into Nvidia's Isaac ROS. An earlier stint at Microsoft's Mixed Reality and AI Lab in Zurich put her on a robotics project for Azure data centres, her first real look at the problem. She left ETH in January 2026 to build Exclaim full time, joined by founding engineer Patrick Pfreundschuh, who holds a PhD from the same university. Two more founding engineers, longtime collaborators of hers, will join in 2027 after leaving their current jobs. The robot navigates a data hall on its own, finds a rack, and works the front face from floor to top rail without any changes to the building. It's starting narrow: cleaning and replacing fibre-optic connectors and SFPs (small pluggable network transceivers), copper cabling, and failed drives. YC-backed Boost Robotics builds similar repair robots for data centres. Watney Robotics is working on comparable autonomy for inside-the-facility logistics and maintenance. Gecko Robotics, further along and better funded, handles broader industrial inspection. Most of them span inspection and logistics. Exclaim believes everything on one job: hands-on repair inside a live 800-volt rack. The investors and the market. The global data centre robotics market was worth roughly $13.7 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit $44.2 billion by 2030, a 21.6% compound annual growth rate, according to Research and Markets. It's part of a wider bet on the physical layer of AI infrastructure that TFN has tracked before, including Palo Alto-based PicoJool's $12 million raise for optical connectivity in hyperscale data centres. Playfair has co-led robotics bets rounds: a $4.3 million pre-seed round for fellow Zurich startup Ascento, an autonomous security patrol robot, and Recycleye, an AI waste-sorting company it has since exited. As data centre operators worldwide continue to invest in larger and more complex facilities, the need for autonomous maintenance solutions is expected to grow alongside these investments. The startup also joins a growing cohort of European robotics companies developing AI systems for infrastructure, logistics and industrial environments.