The archive · Hardware & Devices · Strategic decision · 2022–2026
Collaborative Robotics bets non-humanoid robots win work; Proxie rents from $5K/mo
Ex-Amazon Robotics VP Brad Porter bets safe non-humanoid cobots take human-scale tasks; $140M raised, Proxie ships from $5,000/month.
Collaborative Robotics
What the business is
Collaborative Robotics (Cobot) makes Proxie, a mobile collaborative robot that moves carts, boxes and totes end-to-end in hospitals, warehouses and factories, and sells it as a service from $5,000/month.
Starting capital：$10M seed (2022), $30M Series A led by Sequoia Capital (July 2023), $100M Series B led by General Catalyst (April 2024) - about $140M total.
How it started
Brad Porter spent 13 years at Amazon, rising to VP and Distinguished Engineer of Amazon Robotics and leading its industrial robotics team until mid-2020, by which time Amazon had built one of the world's largest robot fleets. He founded Collaborative Robotics in 2022 on a $10M seed with a contrarian thesis: 'It's not a humanoid, but something to take on human-scale tasks,' he told TechCrunch. For two years the company refused to reveal the design while working with customers like the Mayo Clinic on early revenue streams.
What happened
In July 2023 the startup raised a $30M Series A led by Sequoia Capital with 23 employees; a $100M Series B led by General Catalyst followed in April 2024 (with Bison Ventures, Industry Ventures and Lux Capital), bringing total funding to $140M. First robots entered customer sites in early 2024, and Proxie launched publicly in November 2024 with Maersk, Mayo Clinic, Moderna, Owens & Minor and Tampa General Hospital as named customers. At Automate 2026 in June, Cobot announced Proxie Gen 2: Gen 1 had logged 12,627 operating hours across hospitals, manufacturing and logistics, moving over 40 million pounds and saving over 17 million steps.
How it ended up
Still live and scaling: Proxie Gen 2 is available to order from $5,000/month with deployments beginning in 2026, runs on NVIDIA Jetson compute with AWS fleet intelligence, and targets hospitals, warehouses, labs and factories.
Background
Collaborative Robotics (Cobot), founded in 2022 by Brad Porter in Santa Clara, California, makes Proxie: a non-humanoid mobile collaborative robot that identifies material-handling work and completes it end-to-end. Porter spent 13 years at Amazon, ending as VP and Distinguished Engineer of Amazon Robotics, and the company's team draws on Apple, Meta, Google, NASA and Waymo.
The founding bet was explicitly anti-humanoid. As TechCrunch put it in 2024, 'Humanoids have sucked a lot of the air out of the room' - but Porter argued that efficacy and scalability, not looks, would decide the category. Cobot built toward 'human problem solving' in a machine that moves boxes, totes and carts alongside people, and kept its design secret for two years while a Cobot Flywheel Program put early units with customers including the Mayo Clinic.
Money followed the contrarian positioning: a $30M Series A led by Sequoia Capital in July 2023, then a $100M Series B led by General Catalyst in April 2024, taking total funding to $140M. First robots entered field sites in early 2024, and Proxie launched publicly in November 2024 with Maersk, Mayo Clinic, Moderna, Owens & Minor and Tampa General Hospital as customers - evidence that enterprises would buy a pragmatic cobot over a showpiece humanoid.
By June 2026 Cobot reported Gen 1 robots had logged 12,627 operating hours, moved over 40 million pounds and saved over 17 million steps, and announced Proxie Gen 2 at Automate 2026 with orders from $5,000/month. Search interest rose with the product: Exploding Topics' August 2026 list ranked Collaborative Robotics #70 with +4,900% growth. The bet is that robots-as-a-service economics plus zero-integration deployment, not the humanoid form factor, will win factories and hospitals.
What has to be true
- The humanoid boom rewarded press, not economics; skipping the human form cut the cost and complexity of entry while promising the same end-to-end tasks.
- RaaS pricing let operations teams adopt without capital budgets, matching how industrial buyers actually commit to automation.
- Field-first development put robots in hospitals and warehouses before the product was announced, so design iterated on real operating data rather than demos.
- Porter's Amazon pedigree opened doors secrecy would close: customers approached Cobot before the hardware existed, funding early flywheel deployments.
- On-robot AI and zero-integration deployment attacked the integration cost that kills automation projects, shrinking time-to-value for customers.
What can be applied
In a hype cycle that rewards robots that look human, bet on the unglamorous motion that pays: cut cost, prove safety in real operations, price monthly so customers can say yes before perfection.
Aftermath
As of 2026-08-24 Cobot is scaling: Proxie Gen 2 launched at Automate 2026 and is available to order from $5,000/month. Gen 1 logged 12,627 operating hours across hospitals, manufacturing and logistics, moving over 40 million pounds, with customers including Mayo Clinic and Maersk. Funding stands at about $140M, and Exploding Topics' August 2026 list ranked Collaborative Robotics #70 with +4,900% search growth. The open questions are unit economics at fleet scale and whether humanoid rivals match Proxie's price-performance.
Sources
- Collaborative Robotics raises $30M to develop and deploy 'novel cobot'
- Collaborative Robotics is prioritizing 'human problem solving' over humanoid forms
- Introducing Proxie, Cobot's Collaborative Robot, Built for the Real World
- Cobot Announces Second-Generation Proxie, Bringing Production-Tested Physical AI to Real Operations
- Top Trending Topics (Aug 2026)
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