LG Electronics isn’t a well-known brand when it comes to smartphones anymore, but the company still thinks that stuff like robots will be big in the future. Today, the company announced that it will invest $60 million in Bear Robotics, a Californian startup that makes server robots for restaurants and other places that are powered by artificial intelligence. These robots are autonomous tray towers on wheels that are meant to replace waiters. LG Electronics now has the most shares in Bear thanks to the investment.
According to PitchBook, Bear’s last round of funding in 2022 put the value of the company at just over $490 million after the money was raised. While it’s not clear how much this new investment is worth, it has not been a good year for startups in this space.
Today, people are interested in AI and the general progress that comes with it. This is good for robotics players; see yesterday’s Covariant news for another example. Still, it’s not clear what Bear plans to do next with the basic trays-on-wheels design it used for its most popular Servi robots.
We’ve Asked Bear And LG For More Information.
Bear’s investment comes almost two months after LG CEO William Cho hinted at the company’s interest in investing in delivery and logistics robots at CES 2024. The company is now putting its money where its mouth is.
LG shut down its struggling mobile business around the world in April 2021. The Korean electronics and appliance giant then focused on other areas of growth, such as smart homes, connected devices, the Internet of Things (IoT), parts for electric vehicles (EVs), and platforms for robotics and artificial intelligence.
“As the service robot market enters a period of growth, this equity investment will significantly contribute to securing a ‘Winning competitive edge’ for the company,” LG Electronics’ chief strategy officer, Lee Sam-soo, said in a statement. “In the medium to long term, we want to turn our robot business into a new source of growth. We will do this by exploring different opportunities by combining cutting-edge technologies like Embodied AI and robotic manipulation.”
For LG, this is not their first investment in a robotics business. The Korean electronics business has been studying robotics and making software and hardware for them. LG said that in 2017, guide robots were put in place at Incheon International Airport, which is South Korea’s busiest airport.
John Ha, a former Google software worker who now runs a restaurant, started Bear in 2017 after seeing how hard things could get. Ha was inspired to make serving robots after seeing directly how hard it is to run a restaurant.
The company with SoftBank backing runs its delivery robots inside homes in the US, South Korea, and Japan. These serving robots, which are meant to help restaurants serve food to customers, have been used successfully in a number of places.
“Just like Android changed the way smartphones work, standardized open platforms are needed to get the robot market going,” Ha said.
Also Read: Tokyo’s Uber Eats Will Use Cartken’s Sidewalk Robots to Start a Delivery Service
Last month, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Meta, met with LG’s CEO to talk about how the two companies might work together to make extended reality (XR) devices. LG reorganized its staff in late November and formed an extended reality (XR) team to speed up the creation of an XR device with a target date of 2025.
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