Steve Jurvetson's fund Future Ventures invested in US robotics solutions for warehouse Robust.AI
Future Ventures, US fund of venture capitalist with Estonian roots Steve Jurvetson, invested in a US-based solution for warehouse logistics Robust.AI. A $20M round was backed also by US investment firms Prime Movers Lab, Energy Impact Partners, JAZZ Ventures, and Playground Global.
Robust AI was founded in San Carlos, California in 2019 by Anthony Jules, Rodney Brooks, Mohamed R. Amer, and Henrik Christensen. The startup developed an autonomous warehouse cart Carter and the software Grace, which both work in pair. The autonomous cart does the transport of packages and can follow workers around after a quick setup. Human employees can also grab the handles and move them around manually. Robust AI software helps to map out locations, workflows, and behaviors for the robot fleet in a day with no-code setup and customization tools.
Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson is a son of Estonian immigrants. His father fled Estonia in 1944. Steve Jurvetson became one of the first people, born outside of Europe, to receive an Estonian e-residency card. Formerly a partner of US firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), Steve is an early investor in US company Planet Labs (it has launched the largest constellation of Earth-observation micro-satellites), Elon Musk's aviation and space company SpaceX and electric vehicles developer Tesla, and Commonwealth Fusion (US research company that focuses on bringing fusion energy technology to the market). Jurvetson was a member of the Tesla board of directors from 2006 to December 2020.
Future Ventures was founded by Steve Jurvetson and Maryanna Saenko in 2019 in San Francisco. In April 2023, Future Ventures closed its third $200M fund. The fund focuses on seed- and early-stage companies, with initial checks of between $3M to $6M. The main areas of investment are machine intelligence, sustainable mobility, the future of food, computational biology, high-performance computing, and aerospace.
