Rapyuta Robotics collects USD 10 Million in Series A

Rapyuta Robotics, an ETH Zurich spin-off based in Zurich, has successfully closed series A financing round with USD 10 million. The financing comes from SBI investments Co. Ltd., one of Japan’s leading financial investors, who also invested in Rapyuta Robotics’s seed round, which was led 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, Rapyuta Robotics 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. The company 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, the company has now grown to twenty-seven full-time employees spread across three offices located in India, Japan, and Switzerland. The team was recently been complemented by Kai Matsuda – Chief Financial Officer, previously Vice President of the Japan-based Finance at freee K.K. – and Mana Yamawaki – Director of Business Development, previously Vice President at Innovation Network Corporation of Japan. With a well-rounded team of engineers, Rapyuta Robotics is now geared towards bringing one of its prototype cloud robotics platform to the market by mid-2017.

In addition, the start-up recently received USD 500,000 in support from the Swiss federal government (CTI - Commission of Technology and Innovation) for its joint work with the Institute of Applied Information Technology Cloud Computing Lab at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. This will enable the company to accelerate the 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.

(RAN)