READY Robotics builds Forge/OS, an industrial operating system that standardizes control of heterogeneous robots and peripherals via a common set of APIs. The company offers low-code applications, including Task Canvas, which the article says enables operators to write robot programs 2–10x faster than existing robot languages. Forge/OS is hardware-agnostic and supports robot brands such as UR, ABB, Fanuc, Kawasaki, Staubli, Universal Robots and Yaskawa. READY emphasizes simplifying deployment and management of robot cells for non-engineers, addressing a shortage of robot programmers. The company is integrating Forge/OS with NVIDIA Omniverse Isaac Sim to accelerate simulation and deployment. READY plans global expansion, supported by strategic investments intended to accelerate integration with NVIDIA and broader market growth. The article frames Forge/OS as targeting large-scale, defensible market opportunity in factory and warehouse automation. Ready Robotics is a Johns Hopkins spinout that builds Forge O/S, an operating system and dashboard that enables workers without robotics or coding backgrounds to program and manage industrial robot arms across multiple vendor platforms. Forge O/S is designed to be interoperable with a variety of robot manufacturers, allowing mixed-robot plants to run through a single interface; pricing starts around $10,000 per year and scales with complexity and number of robots/factories. The company counts customers including Stanley Black & Decker and Smith+Nephew as well as smaller shops that otherwise could not automate. Founders Ben Gibbs and Kel Guerin moved operations to Columbus, Ohio after a 2018 investment from Drive Capital; Johns Hopkins retains a small ownership stake. The startup says its software addresses a shortage of robotics engineers in manufacturing and the high integration costs that impede broader automation adoption. Ready has raised a total of $42 million to date and is operating amid a nascent robots-as-a-service market that analysts expect could grow substantially by 2030. Ready Robotics provides a SaaS platform that enables manufacturers to automate and manage human-safe collaborative industrial robots from Yaskawa-Motoman, ABB, Fanuc and Universal Robots. The platform also supports attaching peripherals, triggering sensors and communicating with machines. The company is based in Columbus, Ohio and was founded in 2016. Ready Robotics intends to use the new funding to continue expanding operations. As of the article, the company has raised nearly $19M in total funding. The product is positioned at the intersection of industrial automation and robot management software.

Total raised

$38M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Feb 2020