Swiss-Mile has raised 22 million dollars in a seed financing round. It was led by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos via his investment company Bezos Expeditions and HongShan, the Chinese arm of Silicon Valley venture capital giant Sequoia, according to a statement. The Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund also participated, as well as ArmadaInvestment from Zurich as the only European investor and the existing investor Linear Capital based in Shanghai.
They all believe that Swiss-Mile will play a leading role in the embodied intelligence sector with its robotic dog on wheels. The Zurich-based robotics startup emerged from Professor Marco Hutter's Robotic Systems Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) in April 2023. The robotics pioneer is part of the founding team of Swiss-Mile. In June he received this year's Rössler Prize from the ETH Foundation, which is the ETH's most highly endowed research prize of 200,000 Swiss francs.
The founders have enabled the quadrupedal robot to walk, drive, stand upright on two legs and manipulate packages with wheeled end-effectors. By integrating reinforcement and supervised learning into a unified framework, the team enabled the robots to autonomously learn and adapt based on real-world deployments.
Swiss-Mile has reportedly begun pilot integrations with beta customers around the world, facilitating tests of embodied artificial intelligence in diverse real-world environments. According to Daniel S. Aegerter, CEO and founder of Armada Investment, the wealth of potential use cases will herald “a new era of economic activity”. According to its head Franziska Bossart, the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund is “delighted to support their team, recognizing the potential these technologies hold for Amazon”. ce/mm
The Silicon Valley of Robotics
The Silicon Valley of Robotics
Switzerland is known as the Silicon Valley of Robotics and the Greater Zurich Area contributes considerably to this peak position: Its universities and technology companies belong among the world’s leaders in autonomous & intelligent systems, computer vision, sensor technology, and artificial intelligence. Switzerland’s traditional strengths in mechanical engineering and precision goods contribute to this standing.
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