A letter from Tutor Intelligence co-founder and CEO Josh Gruenstein announcing their $34M Series A financing led by Union Square Ventures.

Today Tutor is announcing our $34M Series A financing led by USV and co-led by Fundomo with participation from our lead seed investor Neo. This brings our total funding to date to $42M.

In the last year Tutor’s footprint has grown dramatically, breaking common expectations for the deployment of new robotics technology. We’ve proven that the recipe of low-cost, drop-in robots powered by fleet-scale learning can deliver massive customer value with rapid adoption.

Alon and I started Tutor with the vision of putting robots everywhere. We had both been building robots as a hobby long before we ever considered starting a company; when we first met at MIT, I knew Alon as “guy with the DIY segway robot” (a collaboration with a fellow MIT student who would eventually join Tutor as a founding engineer). I myself on multiple occasions took down the elevators in my childhood apartment building while welding in the basement. Both of us have a particular “full-stack” interest in robotics: not just code or electronics or hardware, but thinking about the problem as a complete system.

In 2020 I joined Alon working at an MIT lab focused on developing robot AI using deep learning. While our peers viewed robot learning as an algorithmic problem, Alon and I were fascinated by the data perspective. Nobody had collected anywhere close to the volume of robot data commensurate to the datasets that were enabling breakthrough results in computer vision and natural language, and with good reason: doing so would cost millions, if not billions. But with a massive fleet of deployed robots doing useful work and thus economically incentivized to collect data, we could engineer a flywheel effect: more learning unlocks more robots, unlocks more data, so on and so forth.

The problem: this approach was “full-stack” beyond the bounds of any research project. To pull it off, we would need to start a business. And so was born Tutor Intelligence.

Today we are one step closer to that vision. We have robots deployed from coast to coast delivering daily economic value by enabling core production for some of the world’s largest and most visionary manufacturing and logistics businesses. Our customers rely on us to support their most critical operations, and we’re committed to earning that trust every day. With this new capital, we’re accelerating development of the capabilities that transform their businesses: robots that learn faster, operate with superhuman intuition and flexibility, and get more done on the shop floor (with affordable pricing).

I’d like to thank Union Square Ventures and Fundomo who are joining Tutor as investors in this round. Rebecca, Corey, and their teams have already made Tutor stronger, and I’m excited for what we’ll build together. And I remain deeply grateful to Ali and Suzanne at Neo, who have been believers since the beginning and doubled-down in this round.

And I’d like to thank the 60+ strong team that is Tutor Intelligence. One thing that is unique about our business is the breadth of functional skill sets necessary to deliver and operate robots for customers, ranging from technicians, engineers, researchers, salespeople, data labelers, operations and much more. I am struck that across all these diverse backgrounds, everybody shows up to work motivated by the same set of common goals: putting robots into the world, building towards a future beyond labor, and driving affordability and abundance in the physical economy.

And the best part is, we’re just getting started.

Sincerely,
Josh Gruenstein (Gru)
Co-Founder & CEO

Source: Tutor Intelligence, https://tutorintelligence.com/blog/tutor-series-a-letter