AI robotics startup RoboForce recently received $10 million in funding to create a robot workforce designed to accurately and efficiently complete jobs that are too dangerous for humans.

AI Robotics Startup Raises $10 Million to Build a Robot Workforce; Photo: RoboForce
AI Robotics Startup Raises $10 Million to Build a Robot Workforce; Photo: RoboForce.

The idea behind RoboForce was inspired when founder Leo Ma visited a solar farm outside Phoenix when Ma watched as workers traversed uninhabitable lands and spent hours securing millions of solar panels. Ma has also visited hundreds of factories over the years and concluded that humans shouldn’t be subjected to these dangerous jobs anymore.

This resulted in the founding of RoboForce, which was created to design hyper-accurate robot workers to do difficult or dangerous tasks. The company’s inaugural product is a robot about 1.5 meters tall with black metal arms.

The company recently announced $10 million in early-stage funding to build out Ma’s robot worker with investors including Nobel Laureate economist Myron Scholes and Ma’s alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University. The design team also includes top tech leaders from CMU Robotics, Michigan Robotics, Amazon Robotics, Tesla Robotics, Google, Waymo, Apple, and Microsoft.

“Roboforce is focusing on the most tedious, repetitive, force-demanding and the certain risk and dangerous work that shouldn’t have to be human to do it,” Ma stated to TechCrunch.

Working in AI robotics is nothing new for Ma, as he previously worked on autonomous driving software at Baidu USA before co-founding CYNGN, an automated driving company. The company will first focus on the solar panel industry as Ma said RoboForce will launch one to two pilot solar projects with its robots this year.

“RoboForce, proudly, is the first and the only one in the market that achieves both the AI model and the robot with the final action as one millimeter accuracy,” Ma said, adding that such accuracy allows the RoboForce robot to do fine motor tasks such as tightening a screw in the middle of the Arizona desert.