Ottonomy closes $3.3 million seed funding round

Ottonomy has closed its seed funding round of $3.3 million, bringing its total funding to date to $4.9 million.

The funding is planned to support the scale of Ottobots for fully autonomous airport, retail and restaurant deliveries with its robots.

The funding round is led by Pi Ventures who back deep tech startups. Connetic Ventures and Branded Hospitality Ventures and the Founder & CEO of Addverb Technologies, Sangeet Kumar, also joined this round; making the group a dynamic mix from retail, food and robotics industry investors for Ottonomy’s seed round.

Roopan Aulakh, managing director from Pi Ventures, says: “Last mile delivery is the least productive, yet the most expensive part of the delivery chain. There is a strong need for automation, which Ottonomy fulfills with Ottobots.

“Ottobots are equipped with a sophisticated tech stack both at hardware and AI level. The founding team here brings years of multi-functional robotics experience, reflecting in the world class product that they have built and commercialized.”

Earlier this year, Ottonomy’s claims that its robots – called “Ottobots” – became “the world’s first autonomous robots to deliver food, beverage and travel retail items at airports”.

Ottobot 2.0 evolved from early pilots to include fully customizable modular cabins, increased access for customers and directional mobility, including crab mode.

Ritukar Vijay, co-founder and CEO, says: “The team and I have been deeply vested into autonomous driving for more than a decade. We believe fully autonomous delivery robots are not only a precursor to autonomous vehicle proliferation but are solving today’s biggest challenges like – the labor shortage; enabling staff to do more with less.

“Introducing Ottobot 2.0, we are bringing best in class maneuverability, accessibility and modularity to our fully autonomous robots; which sets us ahead of our competition.”

With strong customer validation and positive response from customers at Cincinnati International Airport. The company has started partnerships with multiple airports across the US and Europe.

In addition to expanding its curbside and last mile delivery technology advances, the company is involved with top Fortune 500 corporations in the retail and restaurants industry across North America for wide adoption.

The company has also successfully completed pilots at the Newlab 5G Studio in New York using Verizon’s 5G networks, making a “huge leap in capability to deploy large fleets and increasing its footprint across North America, Europe and the Middle East”.