Participated · Series B · Aug 2025

FORT Robotics provides a Robotics Control Platform that delivers safety, security, and dynamic control for intelligent machines and autonomous systems. The company serves over 500 customers with an estimated 12,000 units deployed and holds 27 patents. FORT’s product roadmap focuses on enhancing existing products with new communication protocols, API integrations, and expanded international compliance. It plans to build next-generation safety capabilities, including critical data analytics and comprehensive safety solutions tailored to physical AI. Target industries include warehousing, agriculture, construction, autonomous vehicles, defense, factory automation, and humanoid robotics. Founded in 2018 and based in Philadelphia, FORT positions itself as an enabler for large-scale deployments of autonomous systems across global worksites. Fort builds software to make industrial robots safer around people while protecting them from cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Its FORT Platform fuses functional safety and cybersecurity principles to enable timely, accurate, and secure communication to, from, and between machines over any network. The platform has been adopted by robotics makers including Agility, Hexagon and Moog. The company is Philadelphia-based. Fort announced a $25 million Series B led by Tiger Global, bringing total funding to $41.5 million including a $13 million raise in March 2021 from investors such as Prime Movers Lab and Mark Cuban. The company says the new funds will be used to further deploy its safety systems and scale to meet demand from the next generation of smart machines. Fort Robotics develops safety software for collaborative robots and other autonomous systems, addressing cybersecurity vulnerabilities, system failures, and potential human error. Its platform targets a wide range of verticals, including warehouse fulfillment, manufacturing, delivery, and transportation. The company says it currently works with 100 companies across these categories. Fort positions its product to enable safer deployment of mobile automation across industries. Company leadership says additional investment will allow rapid scaling to capitalize on growing automation trends. The recent fundraising is intended to support that expansion.

Participated · Equity · Oct 2024

Picnic Works develops intelligent robotic technology for food service and hospitality, with flagship products the PPS Leonardo and the smaller PPS Michelangelo designed for high-volume, low-customization environments. Its systems are deployed or piloted in sites including universities, stadiums, big-box retailers, commissaries, pizzerias, and a U.S. Navy base, and the company recently ran a pilot with one of the world’s largest retailers. Picnic positions its automation to address rising labor costs, productivity shortfalls, and food waste by improving consistency, reducing waste, and enabling staff to focus on higher-value tasks. The company said it will use new capital to scale operations, ramp up production, accelerate delivery capabilities, and meet growing North American demand. Picnic emphasizes customer-centric partnerships and has cited use cases ranging from traditional pizzerias to high-volume venues like sports arenas. Picnic is a Seattle-based food automation company that has developed the Picnic Pizza System, a pizza-assembly machine for restaurants and commercial kitchens. The system dispenses fresh ingredients onto hand-made dough and enables a single employee to produce up to 100 12-inch customized pizzas per hour. The recipe and ingredient dispensing can be tweaked to suit the restaurant or kitchen owner. Picnic positions the system as small-footprint, contactless, easy to install, and available with no upfront fees. The company has been iterating on system enhancements throughout 2021 and is preparing installations with additional customers. Recent financing will be used to grow the team, attract talent, and expand commercial operations to scale deployments. Picnic develops robotic systems that automate the pizza-making and assembly process. The company says interest in its pizza system has ramped up recently and it has announced partnerships with Orion Land Mark, Ethan Stowell Restaurants, National Service Cooperative and Baseline Hardware Financing. Picnic plans to roll its technology out to restaurants and other public gathering spaces, including schools, stadiums and hospitals. The latest financing will be used to add headcount and expand operations. The article positions Picnic as one of a handful of companies targeting pizza automation alongside peers such as XRobotics and the now-exited Zume. Picnic designs an internet-connected pizza-making robot that can produce up to 300 12-inch customized pizzas per hour, using a vision system, conveyor, and automated sauce, cheese and topping dispensers. The company is preparing for a commercial rollout and says demand has increased during the pandemic as operators seek lower-contact food preparation. Picnic’s business model is pizza-as-a-service: restaurant owners pay a recurring fee for the system plus maintenance and software/hardware updates. The recent funding will be used for product development, hiring, responding to customer interest, and marketing. Picnic has expanded its team, hiring a chief food scientist and a vice president of sales, and was a finalist for Hardware/Gadget of the Year at the GeekWire Awards. The company has operated under prior names Otto Robotics and Vivid Robotics and is positioning itself amid competitors and pilots from larger players testing kitchen automation. Picnic develops a configurable, modular automated pizza assembly system that launched in October and integrates with cloud analytics. The platform focuses on high-volume pizza production, reaching rates of up to 180 18-inch pizzas or 300 12-inch pizzas per hour. It is designed to fit into existing kitchen layouts, including food trucks and kiosks, and connects to Picnic’s software for backend data to improve consistency, speed, and reduce food waste. Picnic operates on a robotics-as-a-service subscription model, with users paying for the system on a subscription basis. The company has deployed its system with customers including Centerplate and Washington-based Zaucer Pizza. Picnic recently raised $5 million in seed funding to support product development, hiring, and marketing and has added experienced hires including Kennard Nielsen (VP of engineering) and Mike McLaughlin (VP of product).

Participated · Equity · May 2024

Relectrify engineers CellSwitch™, a cell-level control electronics and software platform that manages individual battery cells to extract more energy and extend operational life by up to 30 percent. The technology can eliminate conventional inverters, lowering CAPEX and reducing failure and safety risks. Relectrify has completed industrial-scale rollouts and works with global customers, partners and battery manufacturers. Its IP is protected by over 30 granted and pending patents across the US, Canada, Europe, South Korea, China and Japan. The company is headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, and the new funding is intended to scale the CellSwitch technology into international battery storage markets. Clean Energy Finance Corporation has been a notable investor, with total commitments reported in the article. Relectrify has developed a cell-level battery management system that can produce a high-efficiency AC output directly from the battery pack, replacing a separate inverter. Its BMS+Inverter architecture reportedly extends battery lifetime by up to 30% while reducing electronics cost by around 30%. The solution supports new and second-life Li-ion and alternative chemistry batteries and has been demonstrated with customers including American Electric Power, Nissan North America and Counties Energy. The company commercialises both embedded implementations with BESS manufacturers and circular-economy second-life systems such as the ReVolve™, a 120 kWh / 36 kW BESS using repurposed Nissan Leaf cells. Relectrify is expanding its commercialisation team and forming partnerships in the US, EU and Asia while continuing R&D to extend its cell-based control technology. The company reports an increasing pipeline of commercial projects and multi-MWh rollouts of ReVolve™ systems. Relectrify builds battery and inverter systems that reuse second‑life electric vehicle battery packs, combining hardware and software in an advanced BMS+Inverter battery control technology. The company is launching a 36 kW / 120 kWh commercial-scale modular battery product roughly ten times the size of a Tesla Powerwall 2. Its technology, developed with ARENA support in 2018, is designed to boost battery lifetime and performance while reducing system costs. Relectrify is executing a $3.3 million project to finalise development, undertake certifications and roll out 20 battery units across commercial and industrial customer applications in Australia. The company will offer units to selected utilities, industry and community customers, both grid-connected and off-grid, for applications including solar integration, backup power for farms and microgrids, deferring network upgrades, and replacing diesel generators. ARENA has provided $1.49 million in funding from the Australian Government to advance the project. Relectrify develops technology to repurpose used electric-vehicle (EV) batteries for behind-the-meter household energy storage. Its system combines power-electronics hardware with battery-optimisation software to reduce repurposing costs while boosting performance and extending battery lifetime. The company notes that up to 80% of an EV battery’s storage capability can remain after it is no longer suitable for driving, and many cells can be charged and discharged a further 2,000 times. Relectrify plans to expand production and conduct commercial trials of second-life batteries with the aim of becoming a global leader. Financially, it secured a $750,000 early-stage equity investment from the Clean Energy Innovation Fund as part of a $1.5 million pre-Series A equity raise. Co-founded by Daniel Crowley and Valentin Muenzel in 2015, the Melbourne-based company is an alumnus of the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Accelerator.

Participated · Series A · Mar 2024

Tierra Biosciences operates an AI-guided, cell-free platform that produces custom proteins from digital sequences and DNA, enabling customers to order proteins online for pharmaceutical, industrial, and agricultural uses. The platform generates cell-free reagents that are combined with customer sequences and robotic workflows to synthesize proteins and feed data back into a closed-loop AI model. Tierra says its model has produced more than 5,000 proteins to date and that the dataset grows with each run, improving predictive performance. The company currently produces milligram quantities for customers and plans to scale to gram-scale production in the next month or two to support pilot programs. Tierra launched the commercial platform about a year ago, rebranded from Synvitrobio (previously raised $2.6M in 2018) and has secured $7.2M in grants from agencies including ARPA-E, NIH, and DARPA. Management added Michael Nemzek as CEO in 2022 and plans to use new funding to expand customers, build AI data-generation capabilities, and hire a commercial team. Tierra Biosciences is commercializing a cell-free manufacturing platform that strips cellular components to run biochemical reactions in vitro, enabling faster design-build-test cycles and high-throughput data collection. The company emphasizes applications in agricultural and biochemical products while also pursuing biopharmaceutical opportunities. Under CEO Zachary Sun and co-founders Richard Murray and George Church, Tierra positions its platform as a way to run reactions without cell walls by isolating ribosomes and supplying defined substrates and DNA. Tierra is working with Oak Ridge National Laboratory to develop processes to produce vanillin and mevalonate from biomass and says it has partnerships with Global 2000 companies in the works. The startup rebranded from Synvitrobio to emphasize its natural products and biochemical focus and has taken on $2.6 million in new financing. Tierra’s technology is being pitched as broadly applicable across pesticides, flavorings, pharmaceuticals and energy markets. The company has also received support from government and research funders including DARPA, the NIH, the Department of Energy, Cyclotron Road, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the NSF and the Gates Foundation.

Participated · Series A · Dec 2023

Cytonus Therapeutics is developing a proprietary Cargocyte™ Drug Delivery Platform—engineered, synthetic cell-like delivery vehicles designed to carry multiple therapeutic payloads into hard-to-reach tissues. The company has built a pipeline of proprietary immunotherapeutic products targeting cancers, infectious diseases, inflammatory diseases, and cognitive disorders. Cargocytes are described as programmable, off-the-shelf delivery drones that can selectively, potently, and controllably deliver well-validated therapies. Cytonus will use the funds from its recent financing to continue development of this portfolio and advance payload delivery to metastatic tumors and the central nervous system. The company is led by CEO Remo Moomiaie-Qajar, MD, with Chief Scientific Innovator Richard Klemke, PhD, and executive chairman Christopher Thorne, JD-MBA. In conjunction with the financing Cytonus expanded its board and scientific advisors, including additions of Jaeyeol (Jae) An, PhD, and John C. Bell, PhD.