Inbolt, a startup providing real-time robot guidance solutions, has secured a €15 million Series A round.
The round is led by Exor Ventures, the early-stage investment arm of Exor, which is the largest shareholder of industrial groups such as Ferrari, Stellantis, and CNH industrial.
This financing is also supported by Bpifrance and repeat entrepreneur Yann Fleureau, founder of Cardiologs. Existing investors MIG Capital (Germany), SOSV (US), and BNP Paribas Développement (France), are also investing in the round, taking the total raised by the company to €20 million.
The Paris-headquartered startup makes production lines more efficient and precise, with its 3D vision system boosted by artificial intelligence.
Inbolt’s technology enables the guidance of industrial robotic arms and is 100 times faster than its competitors, giving robots the ability to adapt to all industrial environments, across industries such as automotive, electronics, and logistics.
With two European offices, one in France and the other in Germany, and more than 20 factories deployed across Europe and the United States, Inbolt will use the new funding to meet growing demand from new regions, particularly in the United States and Japan.
The manufacturing sector must increasingly turn to automation to meet new challenges such as labour shortages, reindustrialisation and a demand for better working conditions. However, the mass installation of robots has, until now, been complex and represented a significant cost for manufacturers.
Amidst surging industry demand, Inbolt has developed GuideNOW, a turnkey real-time robotic guidance solution that uses 3D vision cameras and is powered by AI. Inbolt technology quickly processes 3D data to determine a part’s position and orientation, enabling real-time robot trajectory adaptation, even in unstructured environments.
Already proven in several dozen industrial sites in France, Italy, Poland, Hungary and the United States, Inbolt has established itself as one of the most robust solutions on the market.
An initial contract with automotive group Stellantis enabled the manufacturers to save more than €3.1 million in one year. Inbolt is also used by customers such as Ford, Whirlpool, Thyssenkrupp Automotive, and Atlas Copco.
In addition to the geographic expansion to the US and Japan, the funds raised will also be used to accelerate product development to expand use cases, and grow the team.
Rudy Cohen, CEO of Inbolt, says: “At Inbolt, we enable any robot to make real-time decisions and adapt to all types of environments, even the most complex.
“With a 400 percent increase in demand over the past six months from various regions, it is strategic for us to strengthen our presence in Europe while accelerating our expansion into the United States and Japan.
“Our collaboration with Exor Ventures and our existing investors will allow us to leverage their expertise and connections with major industrial companies to accelerate our product development and expand our geographic footprint.”
Noam Ohana, managing director at Exor, says: “Until now, manufacturers have had to choose between ROI and deployment velocity of automation solutions. The ingenuity of Inbolt’s platform is to leverage 3D cameras and AI to give eyes and brains to robotic arms that were previously complex to manipulate.
“This solution has two massive advantages: it can be deployed in a matter of hours and at a much lower cost. What convinced us was the use of Inbolt in regions where the cost of labour made automation impossible until now, and its ease of use by less tech-savvy operators.
“We are delighted to be joining Inbolt and to be able to support them in their ambition for international growth.”
Oliver Kahl from MIG Capital, who led the initial round of financing, says: “Inbolt has been moving at an incredible pace, especially over the last 10 months. Going from development to production in factories so quickly is seriously impressive. We’re excited to see how far they’ll take this.”
Inbolt was co-founded in 2019 by Rudy Cohen, Albane Dersy and Louis Dumas, who met during the MSc X-HEC Entrepreneurs program. With their backgrounds in mathematics, artificial intelligence and mergers and acquisitions, the team founded Inbolt following an exchange at UC Berkeley in the United States.
During their time at UC Berkeley, they identified the industrial issues robotics could help to address, particularly the need for greater flexibility in manufacturing.
