Image: Matic
Matic, a robot that can clean homes without human supervision, has also been backed by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.
John and Patrick Collison of Stripe are among some well-known investors to have backed Matic, a US company building fully autonomous home-cleaning robots.
Founded by serial entrepreneurs Navneet Dalal and Mehul Nariyawala, Matic has announced a raise of $29.6m to support general availability of its product early next year. This includes a $24m Series A round co-led by the Collison brothers.
Other investors in Matic include Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub; Matt Rogers, co-founder of Nest; and Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Square.
“Autonomous technology has transformed our roads over the course of the last decade, but its potential utility in our homes has been largely ignored,” said John Collison, Stripe’s CEO.
While smart robots that clean your home isn’t a novel idea, the founders of Matic think they have solved a key problem – indoor cleaning robots don’t do well without a babysitter.
“Just as autonomous vehicles need GPS and Google Street View Maps to navigate, fully autonomous indoor robots require precise understanding of their location on high-fidelity, street view-like 3D maps of the constantly changing indoor world,” Dalal explained.
“Simultaneous localisation and mapping technology (SLAM) and 3D perception enable robots to expertly navigate and build consistent maps indoors, but it’s yet to be implemented precisely and robustly. Instead, indoor robots rely on 2D, blueprint-like lined drawings – a far cry from street view fidelity.”
Now, Dalal and Nariyawala claim to have “solved” 3D perception and precision SLAM for indoor spaces.
“Matic [is] the first fully autonomous home-cleaning robot that proactively maps and scouts floors to quietly vacuum and mop without requiring a babysitter. In fact, Matic is also the world’s first fully autonomous indoor mobile robot,” Dalal went on.
“Designed with the modern homeowner in mind, it not only looks completely different from every other product on the market, it also behaves in a new way. Matic auto-toggles between mopping and vacuuming based on visual understanding of surface types and the mess at hand.”
Nat Friedman, who is also a prominent AI expert credited with the launch of GitHub Co-Pilot, said that Matic is brining together the “best hardware engineers and [machine learning] ML scientists in the world” to improve the indoor cleaning robot space.
“Matic isn’t just building a gadget, we’re developing some of the most advanced 3D mapping and spatial technology on the market.”
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