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Heartland Robotics Inc., the manufacturing-focused robotics company founded by iRobot Corp. (Nasdaq: IRBT) co-founder Rodney Brooks, has taken in $12 million from three investors, and is aggressively hiring engineers, the Cambridge-based startup announced Tuesday.
Heartland confirmed participation by Bezos Expeditions, the firm that manages the private investments of Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos, in a $7 million equity round first reported last month based on a federal regulatory filing.
That round was an extension to Bezos’ first investment in Heartland — a $5 million Series A closed less than one year ago, the company now reports. Charles River Ventures led the extension, according to Heartland.
Heartland currently has 17 employees, and plans to hire about 10 more — mostly engineers — in the next few months, said company president Patrick Sobalvarro. The company is working toward an implementation with some of about two dozen design partners in the manufacturing industry, he said.
Sobalvarro declined to describe the company’s technology in detail but said it is spun out of Brooks’ past 10 years of work at MIT, where he is director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Unlike the “point-to-point” robots currently used in auto manufacturing, Heartland is focused on deploying intelligent robots into the manufacturing environment, Sobalvarro said. “Everything that we’re doing revolves around increasing productivity,” he said. “That’s absolutely what manufacturers need to look for in industrialized countries where the worker is highly skilled.”
If successful, Heartland’s technology will “change manufacturing economics,” he said.
Bezos was also among iRobot’s investors, according to the Seattle-based tech news site Techflash.
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