ViaBot, which has designed autonomous mobile robots for property maintenance and management, today announced its public launch with $6.1 million in funding. As part of the launch, it also disclosed a key strategic partnership with commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, which has deployed ViaBot's RUNO robots to properties in the Bay Area for sweeping and security services.
Gregg Ratanaphanyarat and Andre Ding founded Mountain View, Calif.-based ViaBot in 2016, while both were undergraduate students at Penn State. They observed that outdoor maintenance for consumers and commercial property managers alike was a yearlong problem — one that would seemingly be ideally suited to robotics.
Many property management companies report accountability and cost challenges, labor shortages, and a need for digitization — dynamics that have only accelerated throughout the pandemic, as office parks sat empty, said the company's founders.
ViaBot automates outdoor property maintenance
Outdoor maintenance has historically been underserved by the robotics industry. Developers typically focus on just one problem area — avoiding the so-called Swiss Army knife problem — but to be commercially viable, building managers need multiple services. ViaBot claimed that its robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) modular approach to addressing multiple needs in facilities maintenance and management is the first of its kind.
“We're excited to announce our public launch to scale our robots-as-a-service for property management,” stated Ratanaphanyarat, co-founder and CEO of ViaBot. “We founded ViaBot with a mission to address the dirty, dull and dangerous jobs of outdoor work, and we're thrilled that our multifunctional robots are offering better solutions to the challenges facing property managers today.”
RUNO is designed to clean and automatically dump its debris as well as autonomously “hot swap” batteries, said ViaBot. The robots have multiple cameras and sonar sensors and use GPS to help navigate. ViaBot used the Yolo image network, running images specialized on recycling to train the system to identify objects that should be recycled.
While RUNO cleans, it can also conduct “soft” security monitoring, a program currently in beta, according to ViaBot. The mobile robot's built-in sensors can detect suspicious activity, which it can report to security teams. For example, if a car has been parked in the same place for several days, it will trip RUNO's flags.
“We pride ourselves on maintaining pristine, sustainable, friendly environments across our portfolio,” said Andrew Rivlin, sustainable environments and habitats manager at Cushman & Wakefield. “We're excited by ViaBot's vision to help digitize property management and the fact that RUNO takes on more challenging aspects of our operations while also increasing cadence and output through automation and multitasking. Partnering with ViaBot has been a refreshing and fun aspect in my day to day [work].”
RUNO cleans up
Investors in ViaBot include Baseline Ventures, Morado Ventures, and Grit Ventures, and it has partnered with SOSV.
“ViaBot has taken one of the least sexy industries in the world and brought it right into the future,” said Kelly Coyne, founding partner at Grit Ventures. “Facility management needed a reason to adopt technology, and ViaBot was the solution that finally broke through the noise.”
“ViaBot is already working with many of the largest real estate companies in the U.S.,” she added. “It's gratifying pulling onto a Fortune 500 campus and seeing RUNO sweeping, scanning license plates and more. And even more recently, ViaBot robots were able to take on additional hazardous duties, including sweeping at a vaccination site.”
“In just a few short years, the ViaBot team has countered the prevailing narrative in robotics, showing that robots can in fact evolve and perform more than a single function — and therefore better meet the needs of the properties and communities they serve,” said Steve Anderson, founder of Baseline Ventures. “Gregg and Andre have been building robots for most of their lives and have the rare ability to build and iterate while also orienting toward greater impact. We're confident that this team has the potential to scale to serve millions of properties across the country in new and better ways.”
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