Kyle Vogt, former founder and CEO of self-driving car company Cruise, owns a new venture-funded robotics startup focused on household chores.
Vogt announced Monday that the new startup, called Bot Company, had raised $150 million from former Github CEO and investor Nat Friedman, Pioneer founder and investor Daniel Gross, Spark Capital general partner Nabeel Hyatt, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and Stripe co-founder John. Collison and Quiet Capital.
Vogt founded the startup with Paril Jain, who led the AI technical team at Tesla, and former Cruise software engineer Luke Holoubek.
“We build robots that do household chores so you don’t have to. Everyone is busy. Robots can help us,” Vogt wrote on the social network Our team has spent years building robots (including autonomous robots) that give people some of that time back, and we’re going even further with this company.
Vogt did not respond to a request for comment.
The new initiative comes five months after Vogt resigned as CEO of Cruise, the autonomous vehicle startup he founded in 2013 and which was later acquired by General Motors. His resignation followed an Oct. 2 incident in which a cruiser ran over and dragged a pedestrian 20 feet after the pedestrian was struck by a car driven by a human. The event, coupled with the company’s response, prompted California regulators to suspend Cruise’s driverless deployment and testing permits, effectively ending its robotaxi operations in the state where most of it was located. of its operations.
Since his resignation, Vogt has remained relatively quiet with the public. Vogt’s return, however, should come as no surprise to those who have followed his career. Before Cruise, Vogt co-founded Justin.tv, a website allowing anyone to stream videos online; it later morphed into Twitch, a live streaming platform acquired by Amazon in 2014 for $970 million. He also founded Socialcam, which was acquired by Autodesk for $60 million in 2012.
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