When Seth Winterroth quit his job at GE Ventures and helped launch Eclipse Ventures in 2015, Robotics fell into his mind. More specifically, the number of early-stage robotics startups that struggled to launch due to lack of interest.
“These are teams that just finished postdocs at Waterloo, or CMU, or MIT, and started robotics companies. What we’ve heard continuously from startups is, “Hey, we’re really struggling to develop venture capital in our facility,” Winter told TechCrunch. “At that time, most venture capitalists in Silicon Valley went into the application layer of a very mature application layer or some very mature computing platform.”
A lot has changed since then.
Now Eclipse’s partner Winterroth said that after 10 years of investing in robotics startups, the time to invest in robotics has never been better. The Robotics startup market is mature, with the hardware and software powered by these bots being significantly improved and cheaper.
Investments in this category are gaining momentum as well. According to data from CrunchBase, in the first seven months of 2025, investors poured $6 billion into robotics startups. The data company is projecting that this year’s total funding will eclip over 2024, making it one of the only non-AI categories to experience an increase in funding.
While it can be argued that robotics is surged by investors for AI, it is not wrong to acknowledge the role of AI in advances in robotic technology. Investors who have focused on categories for longer than they have last few years said they have not reached this point due to advances in AI over the past few years.
To reach maturity
The real catalyst for the industry to start gaining momentum actually happened in 2013, Winterros said when Kiva Systems, a small Massachusetts-based startup, was acquired by Amazon.
TechCrunch Events
San Francisco
|
October 27th-29th, 2025
“I would like to say that the acquisition of Kiva Systems is an acquisition that launched 1,000 robot startups,” Winterroth said. “Between 2011 and 2015, it was really like that. We just saw a lot of different new companies starting. Six river systems, or something like ClearPath robotics, have also been successful, but most have not.
This first wave helped attract engineers to the sector and helped companies understand product market fit, he said.
Kira Noodleman, a partner at Bee Partners, did this again. Noodleman told TechCrunch about the trial and error of the past decade that it will help startups understand what the market is actually looking for when it comes to robotics and automation.
Some companies, like Noodleman-backed Rapid Robotics, are shutting down trying to figure out what the market wants. These failures helped the next batch of startup founders. He is now more thinking about what potential customers want in the sector.
Noodleman had similar experiences to her own investment paper, she said, which changed as the market matured.
“The manufacturing of light-outs assumes there are zero people in the loop. It’s just not happening. It proved that it’s already back in the 2010s,” says Noodleman. “I’ll take a simple task. Take care of the machine. It’s just someone puts something in and out of the machine. The point here is that you can imagine the number of tasks that are repetitive, as the machine tends.”
Fady Saad, a general partner at Cybernetix Ventures, focusing on early-stage robotics, set up his company before AI Boom after realising that he spent a lot of his time funding an early-stage robotics company as the co-founder of Massrobotics.
He said the decline in hardware costs has fueled investors’ interest in the sector, noting that building robots is cheaper than five years ago. This allows companies to have a path to more viable scaling, making them more attractive to potential venture backers.
“The cost of building robotics has been drastically reduced,” says Saad. “Advances in sensor technology, calculations, batteries, it was all the perfect time to start a full stack robotics solution.”
The advances in AI have not hurt the industry either. AI is advertised by many as the main reason that robotics has begun to gain attention, along with the appeal of Elon Musk-led with humanoid robots, but that’s not the only factor.
Saad added that AI and major language models could help train robots, but these LLMs are primarily trained online information, while robots interact with the real world.
Some companies build models based on that actual data. Nvidia released a set of new world models for robot training in August. However, Saad predicted that it would take a little time to register and train robots, especially those that exist with people, in the world’s data.
the current
The industry may be starting to grow, but that doesn’t mean that all startups still understand the best approach. Also, some categories within the robot are not as mature as the others.
Some of the first few markets to adopt robotics and automation, including manufacturing, warehouses, and construction, remain attractive to robotics startupbackers.
For Winterroth, Saad, and Noodleman, healthcare and surgical related robots are also a compelling area for investing. Noodleman adds Eldercare to that category as well.
“Home support is interesting because I’ve been looking at industrial robotics for 10 years,” says Noodleman. “Manufacturing and mining, labor shortages, aging population, no human is available at any price. Even imperfect robotics is better than anything.”
Saad added that vertically focused robotics companies tend to have access to more realistic physical data than horizontal players.
One area where these VCs aren’t that excited about is humanoids or consumers, not particularly consumer-centric humanoids.
Saad isn’t sure people would want to have a robot in their home anytime soon. He added that even non-humanoid consumer-centric robotics companies are struggling to excite consumers.
“Irobot, the only successful consumer robotics company, was unable to come up with a second act,” says Saad. “Pool cleaning robots, lawn mowers, mopping, floor cleaning robots. None of these worked for some reason.”
The industry is still years away from the commercial success of more complex robotic models like humanoids, but VCs will pour more capital into this sector. Despite the fact that this interest is increasing the cost of trading, the potential customer base of robotics startups continues to grow, so Winterroth and Saad say the surge in interest is purely positive for the industry.
“There are ample examples of successful commercial organizations, successful robotics companies that have become valuable commercial organizations,” Winterros said. “Fifteen years ago, it was doubtful if there was a large and thriving market for these types of solutions. There is a lot of customer recognition right now.”
Source link
