The investment will be used to develop further their technology for no-code robot teaching as well as to develop and validate foundational artificial intelligence models trained for the needs of the manufacturing industry.
The enabler of industrial automation
“Our vision is to become #1 no-code industrial robotics solution in the world by bridging the gap between cutting edge technology and the industry,” CTO and co-founder Megi Mejdrechová said.
The Prague-based team of 14 people brings no-code robotics to manufacturing, with the help of their patented technology, data and AI. Their tool allows workers to directly teach robots without any knowledge of programming. The solution records a worker’s demonstration of a task on the first product, generates a robot program, and allows the robot to complete the rest of the production series. This approach simplifies and accelerates the teaching process for industrial robots by FANUC, ABB, YASKAWA and others. In various industries like spray painting, grinding or assembly, it is eliminating the need for a dedicated robot programmer.
“The investment of BD Partners, Y Soft Ventures, EIT Manufacturing and Jörg Rupp will speed up our market acquisition and make our team grow faster,” CEO and co-founder Ladislav Dvořák explained. “We are hiring robotics engineers, full-stack developers and data scientists to boost the tech development, and business developers to help building our distribution network.”
“Our robot teaching technology is often the essential enabler of automation. That is why customers reach out to us from not only Europe but also Canada, US, Taiwan or Mexico,” David Polák, the Head of Sales at RoboTwin, added. “The need is huge and now we can supply it at a bigger scale.”
Solution for competitive European manufacturing
“For the next wave of automating manufacturing processes, we believe it requires robots that can easily learn from humans. This will allow for robotization of continuously smaller batch sizes and new use cases for industrial robots, also in SMEs without prior experience in robotics. We were impressed by the readiness of RoboTwin’s technology and are looking forward to working with the strong team behind RoboTwin,” Ladislav Bartoníček, Partner at the lead investor BD Partners, former shareholder and founding member of PPF, commented.
Y Soft Ventures happens to be the perfect strategic co-investor for RoboTwin considering their experience with scaling hardware products from Central Europe to the whole world. “RoboTwin is perfectly positioned to bring innovation to the parts of industry that desperately need it, not only for economic reasons, but also because of societal and environmental considerations. That made our investment decision quite simple,” Lukáš Konečný, partner at Y Soft Ventures, explained.
With 30 million people in Europe working in the manufacturing industry, it is also the strategic focus of the EU to support innovation adoption in this sector. EIT Manufacturing as an institutional co-investor is one of those executing the EU strategy to gain more sovereignty and impact in the field of AI-based robotics solutions making European companies competitive. “We have been following RoboTwin’s journey since the very beginning and are pleased to have the opportunity to take it one step further,” Jasmina Popovska, the Head of Investments at EIT Manufacturing, added.
Industry-ready applications as well as validation of foundational AI
RoboTwin connects the world of industry and academia to deliver cutting edge technology to improve workers’ well-being and productivity on the shop floor. “We see that co-operation with RoboTwin can open major opportunities for new research with significant impact on human-robot cooperation,” Mgr. Karla Štěpánová, Ph.D., Robotic Imitation Learning Centre Leader at CIIRC CTU, said. “We see potential in combining the scientific work of our experts with the industrial experience of RoboTwin s.r.o. representatives,” the researcher commented further the joined success of CIIRC and RoboTwin s.r.o. being a part of the international consortia awarded the €25 million grant aiming for European sovereignty and independence in Artificial Intelligence, particularly in the rapidly evolving area of Multimodal Foundation Models.
The concept of a solution for easy robot teaching was developed as part of the academic work of Megi Mejdrechová, the current CTO of RoboTwin. The first boost for implementation came from the founding team winning the EIT Jumpstarter competition. RoboTwin was then incubated by Start It @CSOB, Czech Invest Technological Incubation WomenTechEU grant.
