Intel Capital, Intel’s global investment organisation, has led a USD13 million investment in Aldebaran Robotics, the world-leading European humanoid robotics company. The investment is Intel Capital’s first within the robotics industry and demonstrates its commitment to supporting innovative businesses and to advancing new classes of computing devices.
Aldebaran Robotics currently manufactures and sells advanced, programmable humanoid robots focused on the education, personal services and research markets. Its products combine a range of facial and voice recognition technologies with location awareness capabilities, providing a flexible platform for application development.
The additional funding led by Intel Capital will play a key role in allowing the business to develop its product offering into additional vertical sectors such as health and social care. The investment will also help Aldebaran streamline its production operations and increase its research and development capabilities.
Arvind Sodhani, president of Intel Capital and Intel executive Vice President, says: “We are delighted to announce our investment in Aldebaran. Aldebaran’s work in areas such as voice interaction and video analytics really highlights the advances made in robotics and computing. Robotics has long been an area of interest because it leverages the power of computing to enrich lives of humans.”
Christian Morales, General Manager, Europe, Middle East, Africa of Intel Corporation, says: “Over the past decade Intel has been conducting a considerable amount of research on difficult tasks such as movement in unstructured environments, gripping and vision processing. Through working with Aldebaran we hope to be able to leverage this expertise and combine it with the business’ innovative product offerings to deliver unique and exciting solutions across a range of sectors.”
Bruno Maisonnier, founder and CEO of Aldebaran Robotics says: “Partnering with Intel is a step we believe will propel the business and the technology we have developed reach its full potential. Our products have the flexibility to provide solutions across a range of applications and this investment will play a huge role in helping drive manufacturing efficiencies and further our research capabilities to help the business’ expansion into new markets. Intel products are ideally suited for the processing demands required by robotics. According to ABI Research by 2017 the Personal Robotics market will be over USD17Billion USD. This investment from Intel Capital enables Aldebaran to become a key player in this nascent industry.”
