Robotics investments near $1B in August

Fifty producers of robots and robotics enabling technologies received funding in August 2024, pulling in a total of approximately $1 billion. This figure is on par with the $1.2 billion average The Robot Report has tracked each of the previous 12 months. Investment targeted to robotics companies for the first eight months of 2024 equals about $10.86 billion. You can follow The Robot Report‘s investment section here.

The largest investments in August were secured by developers of autonomous driving technologies. As described in Table 1 (below), they include Aurora ($483M), Luminar ($100M), Kodiak Robotics, and Wayve. Other companies providing similar solutions include Kuandeng ($14M), Gatik, and LeddarTech ($7.5M).

Investment into companies developing healthcare robots was also robust, totaling about $130 million. Example funded companies include Neptune Medical ($97M) and Agile Medical ($14M).

Developers of humanoid robots, along with their quadrupedal counterparts, continue to attract attention from the investment community. Swiss-Mile ($22M), ZhongQing Robot ($14M), Holiday Robotics ($13M), Foundation ($11M), and Deep Robotics serve as examples.

Companies located in USA and China received the majority of the August 2024 investment rounds with 17 and 12, respectively. Firms based in the USA attracted over 80% of August 2024’s funding (approximately $872M), buoyed by large investments into Aurora, Luminar, Neptune Medical, and Kodiak Robotics.

All funding classes were represented among August 2024’s investments. For both the total number of investments and the overall amount of funding, most rounds and investment amounts fell into the ‘Other’ category, a blanket term for investment types that fall outside the typical stages of funding that businesses go through before their initial public offering (ex. Seed, Series A, B, C, D, E and F funding).

August 2024 Robotics Investments

What defines robotics investments?
The answer to this question is central in any attempt to quantify them with some degree of rigor. To make investment analyses consistent, repeatable, and valuable, it is critical to wring out as much subjectivity as possible during the evaluation process. This begins with a definition of terms and a description of assumptions.

Investments
Robotics investments should come from venture capital firms, corporate investment groups, angel investors, and other sources. Friends-and-family investments, government/non-governmental agency grants, and crowdsourced funding are excluded.

Robotics Companies
Robotics companies must generate or expect to generate revenue from the production of robotics products (that sense, analyze, and act in the physical world), hardware or software subsystems and enabling technologies for robots, or services supporting robotics devices. For this analysis, autonomous vehicles (including technologies that support autonomous driving) and drones are considered robots, while 3D printers, CNC systems, and various types of “hard” automation are not.

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Companies that are “robotic” in name only, or use the term “robot” to describe products and services that do not enable or support devices acting in the physical world, are excluded. For example, this includes “software robots” and robotic process automation. Many firms have multiple locations in different countries. Company locations given in the analysis are based on the publicly listed headquarters in legal documents, press releases, etc.

Verification
Funding information is collected from several public and private sources. These include press releases from corporations and investment groups, corporate briefings, market research firms, and association and industry publications. In addition, information comes from sessions at conferences and seminars, as well as during private interviews with industry representatives, investors, and others. Unverifiable investments are excluded and estimates are made where investment amounts are not provided or are unclear.