CynLr raises Series A funding to realize robot vision for ‘universal factory’

CynLr, or Cybernetics Laboratory, today said it has raised $10 million in Series A funding. The company said it plans to use the investment to enhance its hardware reliability, improve its software performance and user experience, reduce costs for the customer, and expand its team.

Gokul NA and Nikhil Ramaswamy founded CynLr in 2019. The Bengaluru, India-based company specializes in “visual object sentience,” robotics, and cybernetics. It is developing technology to enable robots to manipulate objects of any shape, color, size, and form toward its “universal factory” or “factory-as-a-product” concept.

“This round of investments will help us focus on deeper R&D to build more complex applications and solutions for our customers, like Denso, where they need to manage their demand variability for different parts through a hot-swappable robot station,” stated Ramaswamy, founder and lead for go to market sales and investment at CynLr.

He also cited plant-level automation customers. “With General Motors … they require one standard robot platform to handle 22,000+ parts for assembly of the vehicles,” Ramaswamy said. 

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CynLr CLX-01 stack provides real-time, versatile vision

CynLr said its mission is to simplify automation and optimize manufacturing processes for universal factories. It was an exhibitor at the 2024 Robotics Summit & Expo in Boston.

The company claimed that it is building “the missing layers of fundamental technology” that will enable robots to intuitively recognize and manipulate even unknown objects just like a human baby might. CynLr said its “visual robot platform” enables robots to comprehend, grasp, and manipulate objects in complex and unpredicted environments. 

CyRo is a three-armed, modular, general-purpose dexterous robot. The company said it is its first product that can intuitively pick any object without training and can be quickly configured for complex manipulation tasks.

CyRo uses CynLr’s proprietary CLX-01 robotic vision stack, inspired by the human eye. Unlike traditional vision systems that rely only on pre-fed data for machine learning, CLX-01 uses real-time motion and convergence of its two lenses to dynamically see the depth of previously unknown objects.

CynLr added that its Event Imaging technology is agnostic to lighting variations, even for transparent and highly reflective objects. The company is partnering with multinational customers in the U.S. and EU to co-develop pilot applications.

“With the CyRo form factor receiving a resounding response from customers, technology-market fit has been firmly established,” said Gokul NA, co-founder and design, product, and brand leader at CynLr. “These customers are now eager to integrate CyRo into their production lines and experiment the transformational vision of a universal factory that can profitably produce custom-fit consumer goods, even at low volumes.”

Investors support universal factory concept

Pavestone, Grow X Ventures, and Athera Ventures (formerly Inventus India) led CynLr’s Series A round, which brings its total funding over two rounds to $15.2 million. Existing investors Speciale Invest, Infoedge (Redstart), and others also participated.

“CynLr’s concept of a universal factory will simplify and eliminate the minimum order quantity bottleneck for manufacturing,” said Sridhar Rampalli, managing partner at Pavestone Capital. “Furthermore, the idea of changing automation by simply downloading task recipe from an online platform makes factories … product-agnostic. [They] can produce entirely new products out of same factory at a click of a button; it’s a future that we look forward to.” 

Vishesh Rajaram, managing partner at Speciale Invest, said: “Automating using a state-of-the-art industrial robot today costs 3x the price of a robot in customization, along with 24+ months of design modifications. This is the significant technological bottleneck that the team at CynLr is solving, paving the way for long-overdue evolution in automation. We are excited to be a part of their journey in building the factories of the future.”

“Enabling an industrial robot to perform seemingly simple tasks — like inserting a screw without slipping, for example — is what CynLr has managed to crack,” said Samir Kumar, general partner at Athera Venture Partners. “This breakthrough will enable the manufacturing industry to dramatically increase efficiency and maximize the value of production setups.”

CynLr to expand staff, production, and ‘object store’

CynLr plans to expand its 60-member core team into a 120-member global team. In addition to expanding its software research and development team, the company said it will hire business and operational leaders, plus marketing and sales teams across India, the U.S., and Switzerland.

The 13,000-sq.-ft. (1,207.7 sq. m) robotics lab in Bengaluru currently hosts a “Cybernetics H.I.V.E.” of 25 robots, which CynLr plans to expand to more than 50 systems by 2026.

“CynLr manages an extensive supply chain of 400+ parts sourced across 14 countries and will expand its manufacturing capacity to achieve the goal of deploying one robot system per day and reach the $22 million revenue milestone by 2027,” said Gokul NA.

During Swiss-Indian Innovation Week in September, the company opened its Design & Research Center at the Unlimitrust Campus in Prilly, Switzlerland. The center will work closely with CynLr’s research partners in EPFL (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne) Learning Algorithms and Systems (LASA) Laboratory and the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM) in Neuchâtel.

“With the current momentum of breakthroughs in CyRo’s capabilities, we will be able to substantially reduce costs and drive adoption, bringing it closer to realizing the possibility of creating an ‘object store’ — a platform similar to today’s app stores, allowing customers to pick a recipe of applications and object models to have the Robot instantaneously perform a desired task,” explained Ramaswamy. “The company will simultaneously invest in infrastructure for support, solutions engineering, and sales to support this larger vision.”