Tutor Intelligence raises $75M from a16z to put robots to work by the hour

Tutor Intelligence, a robotics startup in Watertown, Massachusetts, has raised a $75 million Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The round brings its total funding to $117 million, the company said in a statement on Monday.

Union Square Ventures, which led the Series A, and Neo, which led the seed round, also invested. Tutor did not disclose its valuation or its revenue.

The money will pay for training Tutor’s robot foundation model. It will also fund building and deploying its two robot workers, Sonny and Cassie. Both run the company’s own models. Tutor started out of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Robots with remote ‘tutors’

Tutor puts fleets of internet-connected robots to work in customers’ factories and warehouses. Remote human operators, whom the company calls tutors, guide them. Every task the robots finish produces real-world data, and Tutor uses that data to train better models.

The robots lift, move and handle goods such as breakfast cereals, snacks, sweets, cosmetics, home goods and toys. They work in some of the largest manufacturing and logistics networks in the US, the company said.

“We can hardly build robots fast enough,” said Josh Gruenstein, Tutor’s co-founder and chief executive.

Robot work by the hour

Customers do not buy the robots. Tutor charges for their work by the hour or by the pick. There is no upfront purchase and no long-term contract. It handles deployment and maintenance, and it sends the robots software and model updates.

Tutor said its robots now work in almost four times as many facilities as a year ago. It expects to have more than 1,000 robots under contract by the end of 2027, all built in the US. Nearly a third of the organisations that got Tutor robots in the past year were existing customers adding more. It did not say how many robots it runs today.

Raghu Raghuram is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a former VMware chief executive. He said Tutor starts from what real deployments need.

“Continual learning across an expanding range of deployments is the path from specialized capabilities to general-purpose robotics,” Raghuram said.

Investors have backed several robotics startups in recent weeks. Formic raised $50M for factory robots. Eka Robotics raised $150M for robot grip, and Maxinsights got $30M for training data.