Swiss-Mile raises $22M for wheeled quadruped

By The Robot Report Staff | September 3, 2024

Swiss-Mile has raised $22 million in seed funding for its wheeled quadruped. The robot is based on ANYbotics’ ANYmal quadruped. Both ANYbotics and Swiss-Mile spun out of ETH Zurich.

The wheels on Swiss-Mile’s quadruped differentiates it from more traditional quadrupeds like Boston Dynamics‘ Spot or Unitree‘s Go2. The company said it has spent the last year running pilots for customers, including last-mile delivery in smart cities and security for critical infrastructure.

Swiss-Mile said its quadrupeds can walk, drive, and stand upright on two legs and manipulate packages with wheeled end effectors. 

“The Swiss-Mile team is building innovative real world-oriented solutions utilizing embodied AI and robotics, bringing their expertise to various industries,” said Franziska Bossart, Head of the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, an investor in the round. “We at the Industrial Innovation Fund are delighted to support their team, recognizing the potential these technologies hold for Amazon.”

Jeff Bezos, through the Bezos Expeditions, and HongShan led the funding round. The investment also included participation from Armada Investment.

Inside Swiss-Mile’s embodied AI

Swiss-Mile said embodied AI is the cornerstone of its robot. The company integrated reinforcement and supervised learning into a unified framework, enabling its robots to autonomously learn from scratch and adapt based on real-world deployments. Swiss-Mile said this approach allows it to generate and scale novel robotic behaviors, continually refining them through data collected from both real-world environments and synthetic scenarios.

“What excites me most about Swiss-Mile is their international and customer-centric mindset from the very beginning,” said Harry Wang, founder and CEO of Linear Capital. “They will be able to leverage their global resources to make Swiss-Mile a leading power in the next wave of physical AI revolution.”

Amazon’s recent investments

Since it was launched in 2022, the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund has invested in a number of robotics startups. Its early investments included Agility Robotics, Bionic Hive, and Mantis Robotics. 

More recently, the fund led Instock’s seed round. Instock offers an ASRS that uses modular racking and a unique mobile robot that can drive upside down on the racks. These robots carry bins horizontally and move on the walls and ceiling by gripping the bin wings, giving the AMRs more space to transport and collect bins, it said. Instock won a 2024 RBR50 Robotics Innovation Award.

Amazon’s Industrial Innovation Fund is a $1 billion corporate venture capital fund. It aims to support emerging technology companies through direct investments.