Path Robotics is a Columbus-based robotics developer that deals with fully autonomous robots by leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision and other advanced technologies. The company is known for its intelligent robotic welding cells.
The company has recently announced to have raised funding worth USD 56 million in its latest Series B financing round led by New York-based venture capital firm, Addition.
According to multiple reports, it has come to light that existing investors including Drive Capital, Lemnos VC and Basis Set Ventures have also made their contributions to the company’s funding round.
Founded back in 2014 by Alex Lonsberry, Ken Lonsberry, Andrew Lonsberry and Matthew Klein, Path Robotics specialises in advanced robotics, automation and software solutions. The company focuses on solving general industrial problems by applying its tools to several manufacturing processes. However, the company is mainly focused on robotic welding and is known to use advanced technologies such as Artificial intelligence, Computer Vision and scanning to determine the sizing of different parts for autonomous welding procedure. Anyhow, it is obviously difficult, even for a robot to figure out the exact shape and size of the metal before it begins to automatically weld it as required.
As mentioned in a report by Tech Crunch, the technology of analysing the right shape and size of the welding metal is definitely an additional difficulty when it comes to working with highly reflective metals. These are some interesting robotics problems to solve by the industry and Path Robotics is sincerely working to make this process more efficient and productive.
According to the company profile on Crunchbase, it is mentioned that prior to this funding, the company had raised USD 12.5 million in its Series A funding round that concluded on December 19th 2018. The round was led by Drive Capital with participation from Basis Set Ventures.
The company enjoyed its Seed funding round back in the year 2018 by raising USD 2.5 million in a round led by Lemnos VC.
As mentioned in a report by Tech Crunch, Andrew Lonsberry, Chief Executive Officer at Path Robotics mentioned in a statement that the current industrial robotics advancement has very little ability to understand their environment and the task of welding or any other task in hand. He further added that merely all robots have the ability to repeat what they are told but do not improvise based on new changing environments. These robots do nothing when it comes to improvisation as humans do and that is something that needs to be taken care of. The goal at Path Robotics is to change that scenario as they believe that the future hinges on highly capable robotics technology.
Anyways, just days ago, Facebook came up with DINO- its self-supervised Computer Vision AI technology that is capable of doing efficient object separation and improvisation based on changing environment. Well, in my opinion, Path Robotics can leverage that technology from Facebook and revolutionise the Robotics industry if Facebook doesn’t decide to do it first because the main problem faced by the Robotics industry at large and especially, Path Robotics is solved by Facebook’s AI research team in a breakthrough, just a few days back.
