December 16, 2019
Dusty Robotics announced today that they have closed a $5M seed round of funding. The round is led by NextGen Venture Partners and joined by returning investors Baseline Ventures, Root Ventures, and Cantos Ventures. The financing brings Dusty’s total funding to date to $7.2 million.
Dusty Robotics is innovating the in construction space with a solution which lays out the building onto the building site, directly from the Building Information Modeling (BIM) software. The company is led by autonomous mobile robot veterans Tessa Lau and Philipp Herget.
“The commercial construction industry is worth over a $10 trillion a year worldwide, yet it’s one of the least automated. Thankfully, forward-thinking builders are embracing the latest technology tools to move into the digital age,” said Tessa Lau, co-founder and CEO of Dusty. “Robotics is critical for construction because it creates a tight feedback loop between digital models and the job sites where work is done, eliminating manual steps and ensuring crews always build off the latest designs.”
Dusty Robotics decloaked in 2019 and announced their first autonomous mobile robot (AMR): FieldPrinter. This AMR uses proprietary location technology to accurately scribe the building plans onto the foundation. FieldPrinter can do this 10x faster and more accurately than any current manual methods. This also eliminates errors which can occur in the process (and timing) of printing building plans and communicating with the construction team. FieldPrinter prints all information from the BIM onto the floor, including layouts for each trade and details about wall types and door styles. What’s more, FieldPrinter creates continuous progress reports and communicates field status back to project teams in real-time so they can respond to any issues. FieldPrinter closes the loop between BIM and the field, enabling crews to build exactly what was designed.
”We’re using the Dusty robot to perform layout on a nine-unit, four-story housing development in Oakland because it’s a tool that can help maintain consistency between the hours spent upfront with project modeling and the onsite layout visuals our field crews are used to,” said Scott MacLellan, principal at Gurnet Point Construction, a San Francisco-based general contracting company. “I’ve been waiting for a layout automation tool like Dusty to catch up with project modeling capabilities for over a decade; the robot performs a tedious and time-consuming task quickly and with great precision, enabling complex construction projects to stay on time and on budget.”
Dusty plans to formally launch the product in 2020 and this funding will help them commercialize the solution. Dusty offers the solution as a robots-as-a-service (RaaS) model with pricing based on the size and scope of the building project.
For more information: https://www.dustyrobotics.com/
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