Intuition Robotics isn’t bad at financing these days. The Israeli company announced a $36m Series B in the early days of the pandemic, and is now adding another $25m. The new increase, which includes $20 million in investment capital and $5 million in investment debt, brings the total increase to $83 million.
The round was led by Woven Capital growth financing from Toyota, along with participation from Toyota Ventures, OourCrowd and Western Technology Investment. The automaker has shown particular interest in the project, with Toyota AI Ventures participating in the 2020 Series B.
Elderly care robots have long been an area of interest for the company, as its native Japan grapples with an aging population. Last time, Intuition announced that it had teamed up with the Toyota Research Institute to bring the technology to the LQ concept car.
Intuition’s core offering is ElliQ, a home-desktop robot designed to act as a kind of robotic companion for elderly users. We first covered the bot in early 2017, but it wasn’t officially launched until March last year. The company has understandably targeted partnerships with government agencies and other organizations in order to bring it to market.
Big contracts – if you can get them – are easier to navigate than the consumer realm. That’s twice as much as somewhere like the US, where elderly care robots have so far failed to make the kind of impact we’ve seen in Japan. Current clients include the New York State Office of Aging, Broward County District Agency on Aging, Olympic District Agency on Aging, and California District 4 Agency on Aging.
Intuition says it is beginning to build on the success of large language models to make systems more conversational.
“By taking advantage of these developments, ElliQ has deepened its conversational capabilities, allowing for the development of a deeper relationship between ElliQ and the user,” reads a statement. “The company has developed technology that selects areas where multiple MBAs can be seamlessly integrated into experiences such as sparking users’ creativity by drawing with ElliQ through the use of DALLE2, augmenting written conversations, and achieving deeper contextual understanding. This is done using firewalls and algorithmic control. in the safety of the experiment.
The new funding will be directed towards realizing existing partnerships and enhancing the robotics approach to the market.