Former Amazon Robotics VP Brad Porter goes Collaborative

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The pandemic was a moment of truth for Amazon Robotics. After years of work, numerous acquisitions and millions spent, could the retail giant’s massive investment in automation help keep things running amid the biggest pandemic in a century? The answer was, decidedly, yes. The company’s deployment of hundreds of thousands of robotics systems across American fulfillment centers has become a gold standard for industrial automation — and a model of disruption that’s helped fuel an industry of like-minded startups.

If anything, COVID-19 and its fallout have accelerated the category. But after 13 years of rising in the ranks to become the vice president and distinguished engineer of Amazon Robotics, Brad Porter opted to step away in August 2020. In a discussion with TechCrunch, the executive cited his young family and wanting to be closer to his wife’s relatives in the Bay Area as factors. Porter spent just under 2 years as the CTO of Scale AI, before launching his own venture this March.

The project — which has, thus far, been listed as “More to Come” on his LinkedIn profile — comes out of stealth today, alongside a $10 million raise, led by Neo and featuring Khosla Ventures, Calibrate Venture Capital and 1984 Ventures. Based in Santa Clara, California, the brand-new startup managed to snag the extremely simple name Collaborative Robotics and the accompanying URL, co.bot — a reference to the commonly used portmanteau abbreviation, cobot.

Both point to the HRI (human-robot interaction) at the center of the company’s mission. Porter mentions the six-degrees-of-freedom robotic arm as being the closest industrial robotics have to a universal and versatile piece of hardware.

“We don’t think that there is an equivalent capability to the six-degree-of-freedom robotic art that’s generally collaborative, works with humans and can meet a wide variety of use cases,” Porter said on a call with TechCrunch. “So we’re starting a company to build that.”

As it’s only 3 months old at the moment, Collaborative isn’t quite ready to discuss what such a piece of hardware might practically look like. What it definitely won’t look like, however, is Tesla’s theoretically forthcoming Optimus robot.

“I’m intentionally not really wanting to talk more about the company than the specific robot,” says Porter. “The way I tend to describe it is, if you’ve got Elon Musk’s Tesla bot on one end of the spectrum, and you’ve got these low-profile AMR (autonomous mobile robot) purpose-built robots that just move a pallet around on the other, we think there’s something much more pragmatic in the middle. We think the Tesla bots are hard and a long ways off.”

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