LOS ANGELES: Andromeda, a robotics company building companion robots for the elderly, led by a 25-year-old Melburnian, is worth $100 million after scoring the biggest early-stage funding round for a woman-led start-up this year.

Grace Brown, a mechatronic engineering graduate from the University of Melbourne who co-founded Andromeda with university friend Yan Chen in 2022, has closed a $23 million series A funding round from investors including San Francisco-based Forerunner Ventures, Rethink Impact and Main Sequence Ventures.
The latest version of its humanoid robot, called Abi, can converse in different languages, be programmed with aged care residents’ daily schedules, lead group activities and build one-on-one connections with any residents who do not receive many visitors.

Brown said the funding will let it rapidly grow its manufacturing capability from eight robots per month to 100, and establish a US presence. She will move to San Francisco this month to set up its operations.

Visible Ventures, Trampoline and Purpose Ventures also participated in the capital raising which valued Andromeda at $100 million, as did angel investor and former Atlassian workplace futurist Dominic Price.

“From a really young age I enjoyed maths and science. I have it in my diary from when I was four or five, that I wanted to be a mermaid, fairy, mathematician,” Brown said.

“When I had the idea of building Abi, it was my own project, I was funding it all myself … I had all the tools and I just got started by myself in my bedroom.
“But robotics is an expensive hobby or passion to pursue for a cash-poor student, so in 2020 I pitched to my tutors and lecturers to fund my project. No one took me seriously.”

Brown said the turning point came in 2021 when she entered and won a contest put on by Vogue for future innovators, with a $10,000 prize. One of the judges was Lauren Capelin, who now works for Amazon Web Services, but at the time was a principal at start-up accelerator program Startmate.

She was accepted into the Startmate program in 2022 and received a $120,000 cheque that let her quit her part-time job at the university workshop.

Brown raised a $3 million seed round in 2024, but quickly realised she was going to need much more capital when Andromeda’s customer waiting list blew out to 12 months.

“In two to three years, I’d like to be very well established in the US, be across multiple continents … and have around 10,000 deployments of Abi,” she said.

“We’re at the frontier of emotion, character AI and social systems design, building a new kind of relationship that feels warm, helpful and profoundly human because the world needs more of that.”

Brown joins a small group of female founders to achieve a milestone nine-figure valuation, at a time when the country’s largest venture capital funds are struggling to meet their gender diversity investing targets.

She said she did not believe there was an overt preference for men over women among investors, but had needed to develop more experience than male peers to confidently pitch for investment against “very, very unconscious” bias.

“The offers I was receiving earlier this year were the same offers some of my male peers were receiving when they just had an idea on a napkin. There was a phase where I felt like it was a big slap in the face,” she said.

“I’d demonstrated that I could lead, build a team and bring a product to market. [Now] I’ve proven that we have product-market fit and that our customers love our product.”

source: https://seniorstrends.com/young-woman-now-has-a-100m-robot-helper-start-up/