Teleo describes itself as a construction robotics startup, but its mission is bigger than automating heavy equipment like excavators and tractors. Today, Teleo’s retrofitted machinery allows its customers to operate their existing fleets semi-autonomously. In the future, the startup sees the data it collects as a key enabler for the robotics industry to reach its “ChatGPT moment.”
That isn’t an aspiration to reach the same level of hype surrounding ChatGPT. Instead, Teleo CEO Vinay Shet sees an opportunity for robotics companies — and namely the one he runs — to gather vast datasets similar to amounts used to build ChatGPT in order to make big, game-changing leaps in robotics.
And investors seem keen to help the startup reach that milestone. TechCrunch has learned that Teleo recently raised $16.2 million in funding through two extensions to its 2022 Series A round. The $9.2 million extension closed in April and another $7 million one closed this week, according to recent filings and information from the company.
“The foundation models that led to the creation of ChatGPT relied significantly on, effectively, trillions of tokens worth of data that was freely available on the internet, on language, on videos, on images, and so forth. That data does not exist in robotics,” Teleo CEO Vinay Shet told TechCrunch. “The best data set that we know of in the robotics world is about 2.4 million tokens, whereas in the language world, they train it on trillions of tokens.”
Teleo aims to bridge that gap by logging data from its own daily operations, which Shet says will end up “becoming the basis upon which you can train true robotic foundation models” that can lead to generalized intelligence.
To build that repertoire of data, Teleo needs to deploy rapidly, at scale, and across several industries. And the company’s strategy for doing that is wrapped up in its semi-autonomous approach. Teleo can retrofit any piece …