Cobot’s $100M and a 25-year story
Hi Neo family,
Cobot just announced a $100M Series B round led by General Catalyst. This turns a new page in a personal story that started 25 years ago and manifests the importance of our focus on people and relationships.
I met Brad Porter in 1999 during weekly visits to my twin brother’s startup, Tellme Networks. Brad was a founding engineer there and a superstar that any startup would be lucky to hire. He’d been a top talent at Netscape and an exceptional MIT grad – an outlier among outliers.
Brad’s subsequent ascent in the tech industry and his relationship with Neo epitomize our principles of betting on star technologists and fostering entrepreneurship by bringing diverse people together.
When starting Neo in 2017, I invited Brad to be one of this nascent community’s first members. By then he’d left Tellme and was one of just 10 Distinguished Engineers at Amazon, overseeing the entire robotics division: everything from Prime Air drone delivery to sidewalk bots to 100,000s of robots across Amazon’s fulfillment network. Brad’s leadership pushed forward the whole robotics industry; it also gave him a vantage point to anticipate future opportunities.
Since then, Brad’s engagement in the Neo community has both inspired us and demonstrated the benefit of our community-driven approach. He's attended more Neo events and mentored more young men and women than we can count. It's only with hindsight that we can connect the dots to see the impact of some of his serendipitous encounters through Neo.
In 2019, Brad graciously accepted my intro to Alex Wang of Scale AI who sought his insights on Big Tech data-labeling needs. A year and a half later, after several calls with me and Alex, Brad joined Scale as CTO. Soon after, Brad led Scale’s acquisition of Helia AI, whose CEO Russell Kaplan was a former Neo Scholar that had first met Brad in an escape room at the 2018 Neo Reunion.
A few years later, when Brad pitched us his ambitious vision for a new company to develop truly human-collaborative robots, I decided to invest within five seconds – or rather, 23 years and five seconds.
It was a privilege for Neo to lead Cobot’s $10M seed round. Within less than two years, they crushed one challenge after another, attracting many of the industry's top engineers and fielding a paid pilot with a global logistics partner. The cobots they unveiled at their January showcase blew us away with remarkable human-level capability at a cost and complexity far below that of humanoid robots.
Today, raising a $100M Series B after just two years puts Cobot in a rare cohort of top startups. Brad remains one of the most talented and entrepreneurial engineers I’ve met. The future will be built by visionary engineers, and we’re eager to continue supporting Brad and team on their mission. The Cobot robots are reliable, useful, and adaptable, and we can’t wait to see them working in spaces ranging from hospitals to airports to stadiums.
Congrats Emily! I met Brad some time ago. Amazing visionary leader.