Tutor Intelligence raises $75M Series B led by a16z for robot workers

Tutor Intelligence, a robotics company in Watertown, Massachusetts, has raised a $75 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing its total funding to $117 million. Union Square Ventures and Neo, which led its earlier rounds, also took part. The money goes to training its robot foundation model and to building and deploying its robot workers, Sonny and Cassie.

Tutor puts general purpose robot hardware into real production sites before the robots are fully autonomous. Remote human operators, which it calls tutors, guide the robots through the work, and that real-world experience trains the models and makes the fleet more capable over time. In its investment post, a16z says this flips the usual robotics playbook of building a general model first and hunting for a use case later.

The robots already work in some of the largest US manufacturing and logistics networks, and Tutor plans to have more than 1,000 robots under contract by the end of 2027. According to a16z, nearly a third of customers who got Tutor robots in the past year were existing customers adding more, and setup can take as little as 8 hours. Cassie is a single arm robot for case picking and palletizing, while Sonny has two arms for more dexterous work. Hourly pricing lets smaller manufacturers adopt robots without big upfront spending.

Why it matters

It highlights a robotics business model that gets paid from day one using human operators, rather than betting everything on a model being ready before deployment.

Source: Andreessen Horowitz