The deal increases Dexterity's total cash flow to nearly $300 million and includes support from strategic investors such as Sumitomo Corp.
Dexterity’s robots are designed to perform repetitive, potentially dangerous tasks, such as loading and unloading boxes from trucks and sorting and moving packages. Its customers include Federal Express Corp. and United Parcel Service Inc. It is one of many startups that are looking to reimagine warehouses and factory floors with AI — replacing or at least supplementing some of the human labor and boosting industrial productivity.
The robots from Dexterity, based in Redwood City, California, promise extraordinary range: They can touch and recognize objects, are aware of their surroundings and react accordingly, and will move gracefully and adapt as needed, said the founder and CEO.
“We are developing a combination of these three factors and believe that it is this that will define the future of physical AI,” the CEO said.
Dexterity uses AI to enable its robots to perform a variety of tasks in the physical world. But unlike larger companies like OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.'s Google, whose chatbots can do everything from recite poetry to generate code, Menon said Dexterity uses a multitude of smaller AI models, each specialized in a specific factory-oriented task. These models, which might be good at tasks like packing boxes into slots or stacking them, are controlled and coordinated by another model.
Source: Bloomberg
