Our Investment in Collaborative Robotics
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Our Global Resilience thesis focuses on modernizing critical sectors - defense, industrial, energy, and healthcare. In industrial, we see constant pressure to do more with less. Companies need to increase output, reduce lead times, and remain cost-competitive while maintaining quality and moving production closer to home. This often requires staffing millions of tough, tedious jobs that are increasingly hard to fill. The problem is especially clear in areas like warehousing, where annual labor turnover can be over 100%, and manufacturing, where the US alone may have 2.1 million unfilled jobs by 2030.
Robots are a logical solution, but automation has lagged behind its potential. In the US, there are fewer than 29 robots for every 1,000 workers, and many of these are limited in scope, difficult to integrate, and dangerous to work around. Robots are usually task-specific and focused on replacing people rather than working with them. This leads to brittle solutions that struggle to scale beyond the narrow use cases they were designed for.
Collaborative Robotics has a different philosophy, one where robots are designed to be reliable, flexible partners to humans, rather than narrow replacements. Cobot is building robots that can adapt to many environments and applications, work alongside people safely, and interact through natural language. While many companies see humanoids as the ideal form factor, Cobot is working from first principles to create systems that generalize well, but are useful today. Capability, rather than biomimicry, is their North Star.
This allows Cobot to ship quickly, gather valuable real-world data, and design hardware that is ideal for solving people’s problems, without the constraints of mirroring human motion. They deployed their first systems within 20 months of founding and with just 30 amazing employees, and have partnered with leaders in industries from biotech to shipping, including Mayo Clinic.
Cobot’s emphasis on speed and efficiency creates clarity. The company sets ambitious targets, seeking a “zone of productive scarcity,” where everyone needs to make tradeoffs and focus on the few things that really matter. Cobot’s engineering teams reflect this principle. The company hires roboticists who can take an idea from basic physics to a final build. These people are harder to find, but have the skills needed to quickly validate their ideas in simulation before doing time-consuming real-world builds.
Cobot’s CEO, Brad Porter, embodies the balance of ambition and pragmatism that defines the company. Hemant first met him in college, when they were classmates at MIT. Brad went on to work at Netscape and Tellme before joining Amazon, where he led all robot hardware initiatives across the company. At Amazon, Brad oversaw the acceleration of Amazon’s robotics program to over half a millionrobots. Amazon accounts for nearly 40% of all industrial robots deployed globally in the last 5 years. That proven experience extends to Cobot’s incredible team who, in aggregate, have deployed over 100 unique robotic systems into production, spanning 24 different robotics companies.
Brad and his team believe Cobot must be world-class at building hardware, software, and institutional trust to achieve their vision. Their hardware must generalize across demanding environments and their software must enable navigation, autonomous action, and seamless communication. Building trust means working closely with launch partners to understand their needs and slot easily into their existing workflows. Rather than an onerous process of defining paths for robots to follow, undergoing drawn-out software integrations, and training operators to use precise commands, Cobot is building robots that learn about their surroundings and quickly become useful.
Cobot has done significant work to balance safety with flexibility, especially in ambiguous cases. A user might ask a robot to “move faster,” and their system must translate natural language to an internal representation of the environment to determine how to respond. The company has developed an auditable framework to show operators how the system relies on environmental context to make decisions. More broadly, we believe the team’s experience deploying over 100 unique robotics platforms gives them the insight and user empathy needed to redefine human-robot interaction. Cobot’s focus on user partnership and thoughtful design is deeply aligned with General Catalyst’s stance on Responsible Innovation, which we feel is vital in a sector with such broad societal impacts.
We believe the generational leaps seen in AI enable a new kind of robotics company, and that progress towards generally useful robots is likely to move quickly from this point. A strong set of recent research results in the last few years enables this, along with increasingly powerful LLMs and hardware.
This technical progress, coupled with the team’s deep experience and pragmatism, we think will help Cobot augment human workers, increase resilience, and enable a more prosperous future. We are excited to lead the company’s $100M Series B and join them on this journey.
Our Global Resilience thesis focuses on modernizing critical sectors - defense, industrial, energy, and healthcare. In industrial, we see constant pressure to do more with less. Companies need to increase output, reduce lead times, and remain cost-competitive while maintaining quality and moving production closer to home. This often requires staffing millions of tough, tedious jobs that are increasingly hard to fill. The problem is especially clear in areas like warehousing, where annual labor turnover can be over 100%, and manufacturing, where the US alone may have 2.1 million unfilled jobs by 2030.
Robots are a logical solution, but automation has lagged behind its potential. In the US, there are fewer than 29 robots for every 1,000 workers, and many of these are limited in scope, difficult to integrate, and dangerous to work around. Robots are usually task-specific and focused on replacing people rather than working with them. This leads to brittle solutions that struggle to scale beyond the narrow use cases they were designed for.
Collaborative Robotics has a different philosophy, one where robots are designed to be reliable, flexible partners to humans, rather than narrow replacements. Cobot is building robots that can adapt to many environments and applications, work alongside people safely, and interact through natural language. While many companies see humanoids as the ideal form factor, Cobot is working from first principles to create systems that generalize well, but are useful today. Capability, rather than biomimicry, is their North Star.
This allows Cobot to ship quickly, gather valuable real-world data, and design hardware that is ideal for solving people’s problems, without the constraints of mirroring human motion. They deployed their first systems within 20 months of founding and with just 30 amazing employees, and have partnered with leaders in industries from biotech to shipping, including Mayo Clinic.
Cobot’s emphasis on speed and efficiency creates clarity. The company sets ambitious targets, seeking a “zone of productive scarcity,” where everyone needs to make tradeoffs and focus on the few things that really matter. Cobot’s engineering teams reflect this principle. The company hires roboticists who can take an idea from basic physics to a final build. These people are harder to find, but have the skills needed to quickly validate their ideas in simulation before doing time-consuming real-world builds.
Cobot’s CEO, Brad Porter, embodies the balance of ambition and pragmatism that defines the company. Hemant first met him in college, when they were classmates at MIT. Brad went on to work at Netscape and Tellme before joining Amazon, where he led all robot hardware initiatives across the company. At Amazon, Brad oversaw the acceleration of Amazon’s robotics program to over half a millionrobots. Amazon accounts for nearly 40% of all industrial robots deployed globally in the last 5 years. That proven experience extends to Cobot’s incredible team who, in aggregate, have deployed over 100 unique robotic systems into production, spanning 24 different robotics companies.
Brad and his team believe Cobot must be world-class at building hardware, software, and institutional trust to achieve their vision. Their hardware must generalize across demanding environments and their software must enable navigation, autonomous action, and seamless communication. Building trust means working closely with launch partners to understand their needs and slot easily into their existing workflows. Rather than an onerous process of defining paths for robots to follow, undergoing drawn-out software integrations, and training operators to use precise commands, Cobot is building robots that learn about their surroundings and quickly become useful.
Cobot has done significant work to balance safety with flexibility, especially in ambiguous cases. A user might ask a robot to “move faster,” and their system must translate natural language to an internal representation of the environment to determine how to respond. The company has developed an auditable framework to show operators how the system relies on environmental context to make decisions. More broadly, we believe the team’s experience deploying over 100 unique robotics platforms gives them the insight and user empathy needed to redefine human-robot interaction. Cobot’s focus on user partnership and thoughtful design is deeply aligned with General Catalyst’s stance on Responsible Innovation, which we feel is vital in a sector with such broad societal impacts.
We believe the generational leaps seen in AI enable a new kind of robotics company, and that progress towards generally useful robots is likely to move quickly from this point. A strong set of recent research results in the last few years enables this, along with increasingly powerful LLMs and hardware.
This technical progress, coupled with the team’s deep experience and pragmatism, we think will help Cobot augment human workers, increase resilience, and enable a more prosperous future. We are excited to lead the company’s $100M Series B and join them on this journey.
