Viam developed an an open-source robot architecture with an integrated cloud service.
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Viam maintains high levels of security for its customers, their machines, and data stored in the cloud. | Credit: Viam
Viam AI secured a $30 million Series C round, led by existing investor Union Square Ventures, with participation from Battery Ventures and Italian investment group Neurone. The round brings Viam’s total amount raised to $117 million since its founding in 2020.
The Viam platform operates across multiple domains, including robotics, IoT, smart home applications, and factory automation. It supports diverse use cases, from monitoring to full automation. It also helps companies without large engineering teams implement advanced technologies.
Viam was a 2023 RBR50 honoree for the innovation of developing an open-source robot architecture with an integrated cloud service. The company’s roots are in the development of enterprise-scale cloud services, and the company was one of the first to integrate these cloud services with an open-source robotics development environment.
CEO Eliot Horowitz, as a co-founder of MongoDB, brings a wealth of experience in developing secure, web applications. Viam was designed from the ground up to be a web-connected, open source, plug and play ecosystem. This enables hardware developers, including robotics companies, to focus on mechanical design, and then leverage hardened software for cloud-based applications, without starting from scratch. One robotics customer using Viam is Tennibot.
Tennibot Rover is a robot tennis ball collector designed to help tennis players train. | Credit: Tennibot/Viam
Tennibot, a developer of a novel tennis and pickle ball training robot, uses Viam software to integrate fleet management, remote operations and preventative maintenance. With the Viam cloud services, the company can gather ongoing data from the field and use this data to train new AI capabilities. Leveraging the Viam platform provided Tennibot with the tools to address their machine fleet and data management challenges.
Attendees of the upcoming Robotics Summit & Expo can play pickleball on the expo floor with the help of Tennibot. The Robotics Summit takes place April 30-May 1 in Boston and will attract 5,000+ attendees from the commercial robotics development ecosystem.
Viam begins global expansion
Viam plans to use the new funds to help fuel global expansion. One of those international markets is Italy, where Viam is working with investor Neurone to grow its presence.
“There’s a lot of great industrial companies in Italy that are doing really interesting things, where they want to be innovative and move quickly,” Horowitz told The Robot Report. “So there’s a huge interest in iterating quickly and bringing in the best new technology in Italy right now.”
He is also bullish on opportunities specifically in Norway, and the rest of Europe, where he said Viam can simplify the complex technical challenges of building and scaling robotic and IoT solutions.
According to Horowitz, the platform also includes APIs and plugins for handling payments securely, which enables all types of business models that can track equipment usage or other optional services. These are the types of capabilities that a young startup might consider building from scratch, or attempt to hack together if not using Viam.
Viam’s platform is fully compatible with ROS. | Credit: Viam
Horowitz described Tennibot’s journey this way: “The interesting thing about Tennibot is that they had built a fully ROS system before, and then needed solutions and things that ROS didn’t include. Now they are taking stuff out of ROS and using Viam. One of the great things about Viam is how pluggable it is. You don’t have to worry about it, and you can slowly migrate over time.”
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