By Max A. Charney
(Reuters) – Software and robotics startup Bright Machines said on Tuesday it had raised $106 million in a Series C funding round backed by Nvidia and Microsoft.
The San Francisco-based company makes equipment and software that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate a variety of manufacturing tasks.
Other investors in the Series C funding round include venture capital firm Eclipse Ventures, robotics company Jabil and BlackRock. Bright Machines also received $20 million in financing from JP Morgan.
Bright Machines plans to put almost all of the funding into its engineering business tackling robotics, computer vision and other automation problems, Chief Executive Officer Lior Susan said in an interview.
Susan said the funding would help introduce “a faster and better version of our platform.”
The company’s goal is to eventually allow engineers to design products within the Bright Machines environment and have robotic systems thousands of miles away manufacture them with the “push of a button,” Susan said.
One key use case is building AI server hardware made by companies like Nvidia. Bright Machines’ tools streamline the manufacturing process for assembled systems by replacing manual labor with robots and software, potentially shaving weeks or months off build times.
“If I could get Nvidia to accelerate their product launches by a month, that would be worth billions of dollars in AI,” Susan said.
Building AI servers is a fast-growing market for Bright Machines, with the company seeing a “tremendous amount of demand,” Susan said.
The company’s tools can also be used to manufacture a variety of other electronic devices, such as mobile phones.
(Reporting by Max A. Charney in San Francisco; Editing by Leslie Adler)
