Tutor Intelligence wants you to rent its robots

I've been waiting for someone to try renting out robots at proper scale and Tutor Intelligence looks like it's actually doing it, so this one caught my eye.

Tutor has raised $75m in a Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Union Square Ventures and Neo back in after leading the Series A and seed, which takes the Watertown, Massachusetts company to $117m in total. It spun out of MIT's CSAIL and was co-founded in 2021 by Josh Gruenstein, the CEO, and Alon Kosowsky-Sachs, and they saw robot learning as a data problem rather than an algorithm one, so the plan was to send robots out to do paid work and let every task become training data.

Customers hire robots by the hour or by the pick without buying anything upfront or signing long contracts, and Tutor handles deployment, maintenance and software updates. Sonny and Cassie, the robots, work in big US manufacturing and logistics networks moving things like cereal, snacks, cosmetics and toys, with remote operators called tutors giving input. They're in almost four times as many places as a year ago and about a third of organisations that got robots in the past year came back for more, which is a decent signal !

Funny bit is a16z led Eka Robotics' $150m Series A 12 days before this, and Eka trains in simulation first, so the firm is backing both approaches at once. Raghu Raghuram at a16z reckons deployment is how you get past the limits of robotics research, and Gruenstein says they can hardly build robots fast enough.

Renting means Tutor pays to build every robot itself, and the new money goes into that plus training its foundation model, aiming for more than 1,000 robots under contract by the end of 2027, all built and deployed in the US.

What I'd want to know next is how much each robot earns per hour against what it costs Tutor to build.

Source: Tech Funding News, Tutor Intelligence raises $75M from a16z to rent out robot workers by the hour