IRobot Co-Founder Has Startup for Flying Robots

November 12, 2013 Leave a comment

IRobot Co-Founder Has Startup for Flying Robots

Nov. 11, 2013 10:21 p.m. ET

CYPHY WORKS

IRobot Corp. IRBT +1.33% co-founder Helen Greiner, who helped introduce the world to the Roomba robot for home vacuum cleaning and the PackBot for battlefield bomb disposal, has another company—this time for flying robots. CyPhy Works Inc. makes drones that launch, hover and land automatically, to help people with tasks performed from the air. The drones are powered through a thin wire that lets them stay up in the air for hours or weeks. The wire also enables the robots to send real-time high-definition video and other data back to the base with less risk of it being intercepted or jammed, the company says. The drones also are equipped with batteries that enable them to fly for shorter periods without being tethered. One is small enough to fly through a door or window.The Danvers, Mass., company, founded in 2008, has been selling its drones in the defense sector, according to Bilal Zuberi, a partner at Lux Capital, which recently led a $7 million Series A investment in CyPhy. The company brings in revenue in the millions of dollars, he said, but wasn’t more specific.

CyPhy sees a huge market outside of defense in agriculture, security, insurance, and oil and gas, even though commercial activity using flying unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, remains illegal in the U.S. for now. “Two or three years ago you couldn’t tell when it would be legal,” Mr. Zuberi said.

Last year Congress mandated that the Federal Aviation Administration integrate civil drones into U.S. airspace no later than 2015.

Now that lawmakers are considering commercial use of flying robots, “CyPhy wants to accelerate the development and deployment of its UAVs on the commercial side,” Mr. Zuberi said.

General Catalyst Partners and Felicis Ventures invested in CyPhy alongside Lux Capital.

—Yuliya Chernova

RALLYPOINT

Veterans of the Iraq conflict have founded a social network to help military personnel and veterans with their careers. RallyPoint Networks Inc. models its site after LinkedIn, but aims to connect those actively serving and interested in learning about military careers and other information and to connect veterans to corporate jobs. RallyPoint has about 125,000 members now and about 15 million people in the U.S. are potential members, said Chief Executive Yinon Weiss, who served near Baghdad with co-founder Aaron Kletzing. The Boston company recently raised $5 million in a round led by DBL Investors.

Building Robotics

If your office is too warm or too hot, Building Robotics Inc. hopes to offer help by crowdsourcing temperature control through a mobile app with which you and colleagues can tell the office to cool down or warm up. Within 30 seconds of tapping “Warm my space” on your phone, “you get an immediate reaction from the building,” said Chief Executive Andrew Krioukov. Building Robotics says its software augments the digital building-management controls system that exists in roughly 60% of large office buildings in the country. The Oakland, Calif., startup recently raised $1.1 million in seed funding from investors including Google Ventures.

Filed under TMT Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

Leave a comment