Press release : September 5, 2016
Tokyo, Japan - Cloud robotics company Rapyuta Robotics has just announced $10 million USD* in Series A funding led by SBI investments Co. Ltd., one of Japan’s leading financial investors. SBI also invested in Rapyuta Robotics’ seed round, which was which was led by Cyberdyne Inc. in 2015.
Rapyuta Robotics has raised a total of JPY 1,351 million (approx. USD $13 million) since it spun out of the Swiss university ETH Zurich in 2014. An additional USD $500K has been provided by the Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation (CTI) to support the development of Rapyuta Robotics’ Cloud Robotics Platform in partnership with the ICCLab/SPLab at the Zurich University of Technology.
Rapyuta Robotics plans to bring an enterprise-ready version of its cloud robotics PaaS to market in 2017.
A significant portion of the new funding will be used to expand the company’s engineering team in order to accelerate product development and testing. The remainder of the funds will be allocated towards business development, sales, and marketing. The team has recently been complemented by CFO Kai Matsuda (previously VP of Finance at freee K.K.) and Director of Business Development Mana Yamawaki (previously VP at Innovation Network Corporation of Japan).
“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 Rapyuta Robotics Co-Founder and COO Arudchelvan Krishnamoorthy.
Rapyuta Robotics has twenty-seven full-time employees and offices in Japan, Switzerland and India.
[*USD1 = JPY 100]
Note: 06/20/17 This post has been updated to correctly reflect our current business activities. We previously stated that we would release an open source version of our robot cloud PaaS in 2017, however, we have decided to focus our efforts on our enterprise version at this time.