Andra Keay, Robot Launch SVR
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The document discusses various robotics companies categorized by industry, including vehicles, manufacturing, health, consumer, and services. It provides statistics on robotics funding and deals over 5 years showing an overall increase in investment and number of deals. Key factors accelerating the robotics industry are identified such as ROS, cheap sensors, improved processors, and critical mass of robotics startups. The "Age of Unicorns" is noted, with the top 10 valued startups from Fortune's 2015 list provided.
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Andra Keay, Robot Launch SVR
- 4. Vehicles, Land, Air & Sea • Google • CARS • Velodyne • 3D Robotics • Novariant • Open ROV • Liquid Robotics • Deep Ocean Exploration & Research
- 5. Manufacturing/Industrial • Adept • FYS Systems • E-systems • KLA-Tencore • Modbot • Qbotix • Redwood Robotics • Otherlab
- 6. Health & Personal Care • Intuitive • Accuray • Tibion • Restoration Robotics • Hansen Medical • Geppetto Avatars • EksoBionics
- 7. Consumer & Service • Neato • Mint (acq by iRobot) • Double Robotics • Suitable Technologies • Revolve Robotics • Momentum Machines • Blue River Technology • Fellow Robots • Savioke
- 9. Silicon Valley Robotics • Network events • Investor Breakfasts • Social Meetups • Industry Reports • Special Interest Groups • Startup Competitions • Media Liaison • Directory • Robojobs
- 11. Robotics overall 5 year funding
- 13. Overall number of deals
- 15. Survey company by founding • An additional 5 surveyed companies were founded between 20 and 140 years ago.
- 17. “Unicorns, Startups & Giants” from Orange Silicon Valley
- 18. “Unicorns, Startups & Giants” from Orange Silicon Valley
- 19. Fortune’s 2015 List 1. Xioami – consumer electronics 2. Uber - transportation 3. Palantir – big data 4. Airbnb – lodging 5. Flipkart – internet retail 6. Dropbox – cloud storage 7. Snapchat – social media 8. SpaceX – transportation 9. Theranos – lab services 10.Meituan – online deals
- 20. Factors accelerating robotics 1. ROS 2. Mobile & smart phones 3. Cheap sensors 4. Improved processors 5. Ubiquitous internet 6. Accelerators/Seed funding 7. Rapid prototyping 8. Entrepreneur ecosystems 9. Critical mass of robotics companies
- 22. The Age of Unicorns From Fortune
- 23. svrobo.org
Editor's Notes
- According to sources like The Wall Street Journal, we’re now seeing “unicorns” , a new type of legendary startup with rapid growth and a rapidly growing valuation and it’s not the same beast as the startups of the past.
- There’s no doubt that robots are hot right now. Ever since Kiva’s acquisition by Amazon in early 2012 for a hefty $775 million dollars, we’ve seen increasing investment in robotics and the insertion of hardware into the startup world of accelerators and early stage funds. Look at the headlines. The whole world is interested in Silicon Valley. And robotics.
- I’m in the middle of Silicon Valley and the largest robotics cluster in the world. Industry group or trade association representing robotics companies and professionals. We are a non-profit 501(c)6 business league formed to support the innovation and commercialization of robotics technologies Founding members were Adept, Bosch, Willow Garage, SRI International and 20+ other robotics companies.
- Some examples of robotics companies in Silicon Valley… just the tip of the iceberg! Companies who are have a local presence and build robotics technologies can join as full members and demo at our investor forums, startup competitions, network events and the big Robot Block Party.
- Our members are companies like SRI International, Intuitive Surgical, Neato, Bosch, and many smaller companies like EksoBionics, 3D Robotics, TerrAvion, DroneDeploy, Fetch Systems and Fellow Robots.
- AS a membership based organization, anyone interested in robotics can join as an individual and receive updates about our events, including private invitation only ones. So while Google is not (yet) a member company, many individual Googlers are individual members.
- Or it might be that different research groups within a larger company join our organization. Plus, we have just launched a new membership option, our Global Partner network, where companies who are not local or not directly engaged in robotics can join as affiliate members and make connections with local robotics companies.
- You can see some of the range of robotics in the Valley at Our 6th annual Robot Block Party, a free public event celebrating robotics during National Robotics Week. This event is one of the jewels in the crown of National Robotics Week. We expect about 40 robotics companies and groups ranging from NASA to high school robotics clubs. We had about 2000 people visiting the Robot Block Party last year! The first Block Party was really the birthplace of Silicon Valley Robotics as a representative organization, although the history of robotics in the Bay Area is much longer.
- Being a single point of contact for robotics, via our website, is one of our most successful accomplishments. But we do a lot of different activities as we explore how to meet the needs of our members, with our very limited resources. Robojobs, a new online jobs site, is another. We also do regular network and social events. Many of our most active and numerous members are the startups and so we have focused events for startups; Startup seminars, investor forums and the global online Robot Launch competition. In turn, this has attracted attention of large strategics who all want to see what’s coming next, and so we’re launching ‘Thoughtleader forums’ . We know robotics is the wave of the future, but we’d like to encourage the sort of constructive high level discussion that this current forum exemplifies.
- We conduct an annual survey of our members. This is the first year that we’re going to make it available publicly because we think that we’ve accumulated enough data to have something to say. It’s a combination of qualitative interviews with 30 robotics companies and data analysis of public funding information. Public data is difficult. Most data aggregators don’t do a very good job working out who the robotics companies are. The only advantage of still being a comparatively small industry is that we can cross reference across industry specific lists. We all know that robotics is not only a very small industry but an industry that is somewhat existentially confused. About what is a robot? Is robotics a special case? Our key findings suggest that robotics trends mirror the macro trends and that there is greater similarity within categories of startup than within verticals or hardware bounds.
- It’s good and bad news for robotics companies. If you look like a unicorn, you may grow like one. But if you don’t look like a unicorn, and many robotics companies look more like ponies than unicorns, then your investment opportunities may slow down. It’s ironic because there is definitely more funding out there for robotics than at any other time. Our conservative estimate is >$1 billion over last 5 years – and that’s not including recent investments, with for example 3D Robotics getting $50million C round from Qualcomm, or Ehang Ghost Drone getting $10million and Sight Machines $5million. (UAV, medical and industrial logistics/analytics robotics companies are doing very well and were a healthy % of our survey) On the (well publicized) M&A front of course, we saw Amazon acquire Kiva Systems in 2012 for $775 million, Stryker acquire Mako Surgical for $1.65 billion, Google acquire Nest (arguably robotics company) at $3.2 billion and then 7 or 8 more robotics companies, albeit at a much lower price tag.
- Silicon Valley is very active in robotics investments, but these figures actually tell a slightly different story. Rather than the Series B crunch or a bubble, the story is all about the unicorn hunt. This chart isn’t about more companies being funded. It’s all about fewer companies being funded more. In the last 2-3 years the number of small investments in early stage companies has skyrocketed, not just in the Valley but around the world, giving rise to fears either of a bubble or of a Series B funding crunch, where every valuation is overinflated crashing the market, or there just isn’t enough follow on funding for all the early stage seed and Series A companies. There’s definitely some evidence supporting tless follow on funding, but the leading edge of funding in the Valley is actually dropping out at the accelerator stage if a company isn’t on unicorn track, or at least a fast growth rate. Some pundits call “Time to Market Cap” the new funding dimension rather than Time to Market.
- It’s clear on our data set that robotics investment is following the trend. Overall investment is up, but the number of early stage deals is not significantly greater in Silicon Valley than elsewhere. In fact, the overall number of deals in the Valley about 1/3rd of the total number of deals done, even though the amount of money invested in Silicon Valley was almost 2/3rd of the total amount. *sure the figures are a little biased towards Silicon Valley
- So, although Silicon Valley is still the big player, there is a surprising amount of early stage and Series A investments happening in robotics and tech clusters all around the world. It’s the follow on funding that is the dominant characteristic of our region, very large follow on funding. Although this chart might reflect just a rapidity between first funding and subsequent funding rounds that we have yet to see elsewhere but will become the norm.
- Our key findings: A small % of companies are growing faster than at any previous time. Even if robotics growth is still slower (questionable) than other industries, this is a trend that is mirrored in every industry at the moment. This was reflected in the size and growth rate of the 30 companies we surveyed.
- Everyone is hunting unicorns now. Looking for those novel solution with a coherent roadmap that targets a large addressable market. *Note Aileen Lee who coined the term unicorn believes that the number of unicorns can only increase, because the market for technology is increasing, not just geographically but as the number of devices in the world proliferates, and more giants create more unicorns.
- A unicorn is a company with a $billion dollar valuation. The term unicorn was first coined by Aileen Lee from Cowboy Ventures in 2013, when she cited 39 startups as the harbingers of a new breed of startups and a new focus in funding. In their February 2015 issue, Fortune magazine found more than 80. As of CB insights found that 16 unic, (9 companies joined the unicorn club in Q1 2015) t. It looks like herds of unicorns out there. They are not unique anymore. The unicorns go hand in hoof… or horn with the giants. Where unicorns are the creatures of today, incumbents largely predate the internet and giants are the monsters in between, who leveraged the internet as a platform to create new categories and markets. A giant is also a company that has the ability buy innovation, to claim new territory by acquiring technologies in adjacent spaces. There is a network effect. Some unicorns will keep growing into superunicorns and then giants, creating more and more unicorns in their wake. (And of course, some unicorns will not survive.)
- Each major wave of technology innovation has given rise to one or more super-unicorns — companies that could change your life to work at or invest in, if you’re not lucky/genius enough to be a co-founder. What do super-unicorns have in common? The 1960s marked the era of the semiconductor; the 1970s, the birth of the personal computer; the 1980s, a new networked world; the 1990s, the dawn of the modern Internet; and in the 2000s, new social networks were built. This leads to more questions. What is the fundamental technology change of the next decade (mobile?); and will a new super-unicorn or two be born as a result? Current figures suggest that the giants and unicorns are breeding like rabbits (so to speak). Internet of Things, Industrial Internet, Robotics,
- What marks this list are the number of new categories emerging, blending diverse real world goods with software
- In both robotics, with a proliferation of modular, affordable, rapidly prototyped devices leveraging open source and startup infrastructure. Finally, not reinventing the wheel. Leveraging things like BYO device or COTS in other robotics solutions and only building what is needed. It’s almost a perfect storm – Never been better time to be a robotics startup. Of course there are still difficulties and it’s still early days. Robotics is going to become a part of just about every business in the future.
- Disruption is coming and like Rodney Brooks said, it’s fast cheap and out of control In both robotics, with a proliferation of modular, affordable, rapidly prototyped devices leveraging open source and startup infrastructure. And in finance, where funding from seed to C is faster than ever before, across the board.
- Don’t ask what Google is doing with robots. Ask what Facebook is, they can spend $21 billion in acquisitions in one quarter without any significant stock downturn. Ask what Xiomei is. Or Space X, or Palantir, Snapchat or Uber. It’s a bad time to be a big business. This is why strategic accelerators are proliferating. It isn’t just about trapping the unicorns out there. It’s also about learning how to recognize them, and perhaps create them internally. Everyone comes to Silicon Valley to ask the question, where is technology going? Where is robotics going? That’s easy to answer. The hard question is where is the business going? What you really want to know is how do we grow our own unicorns.