Press release: September 5th, 2016
Rapyuta Robotics announces USD 10 million in Series A funding to empower lives with connected machines
Rapyuta Robotics (RR), an ETH Zurich spin-off, announced USD 10 million in Series A funding. The financing comes from SBI investments Co. Ltd., one of Japan’s leading financial investors, who also invested in RR’s seed round, which was lead by Cyberdyne Inc. “We are very excited to deepen our relationship with SBI, who were with us from the very beginning, and who have offered us great support with a global-mindset,” says Arudchelvan Krishnamoorthy, Co-founder and COO. With Series A funding, RR has now raised a total of USD 13 million since its founding.
A large fraction of the funding will be used to support and expand its engineering team in order to accelerate development of additional features and new products, testing, and product release schedules. RR also plans to allocate funding towards further business development, sales, and marketing efforts.
Rapyuta Robotics’ mission is to empower lives with cloud-connected mobile autonomous machines. Kicked off in July 2014, RR has now grown to twenty-seven full-time employees spread across three offices located in India, Japan, and Switzerland. With a well-rounded team of engineers, RR is now geared towards bringing one of its prototype cloud robotics platform to the market by mid 2017. The team has recently been complemented by Kai Matsuda (Chief Financial Officer, previously VP of Finance at freee K.K.) and Mana Yamawaki (Director of Business Development, previously VP at Innovation Network Corporation of Japan). In addition, RR has recently received USD 500,000 in support from the Swiss federal government for its joint work with the Institute of Applied Information Technology Cloud Computing Lab at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, which will accelerate development of its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) business. An open-source version of PaaS is expected to be released early 2017 and an enterprise-ready version is expected late 2017.