Blackbird Ventures has led a $4.5 million pre-seed investment round in robotics data analysis start-up Alloy.
The round was supported by Airtree Ventures, San Francisco venture firm Xtal and Skip Capital as well as individual angel investors from companies including Tesla, Waymo, Carbon Robotics, Halter, Reach Robotics and Relevance AI.
Joe Harris founded Sydney-based Alloy in February, recognising that robotic devices such as sensors and cameras generate large volumes of data that need to be trawled through to find useful information. Alloy’s technology encodes and labels data as it is collected and identifies anomalies; these can then be checked directly. If a user decides an anomaly is significant, they can use the technology to find past occurrences and flag similar occurrences in the future.
Harris has been fascinated by robotics since childhood but, with few job opportunities in the field, he worked for tech companies in other areas including software project tools company Atlassian and telehealth business Eucalyptus. Last year, he decided the time was right to launch his own robotics venture and started researching applications in agriculture and particularly in vertical farming. But, as he talked to founders, the issue of managing the data produced by robotic devices kept coming up. He decided he should solve that problem first.
Alloy is currently working with robotics companies including Sydney boat hull cleaning company Hullbot and Breaker which is leveraging large language models (LLMs) at the edge to optimise the control of robots, starting with drones used for defence and other applications. This includes the objective of developing voice communication systems for drones. Breaker is a Main Sequence Ventures investee.
Image: Alloy founder Joe Harris.