Foxglove, a San Francisco-based startup constructing a knowledge and observability platform for robotics firms, immediately mentioned it has raised $40 million in Collection B funding. The corporate has now raised greater than $58 million since its 2021 founding.
Co-founders Adrian Macneil and Roman Shtylman beforehand labored at Cruise and constructed an identical device for the autonomous automobile firm. Whereas at Cruise, they realized how few off-the-shelf growth instruments existed for robotics firms and determined to launch Foxglove.
Foxglove builds information and visualization instruments that assist robotics builders gather, analyze, and be taught from the sensor information that their robots generate. The firm‘s acknowledged objective is to assist construct and deploy extra dependable robots.
Foxglove builds infrastructure to speed up growth
Foxglove is working to convey the form of in-house information infrastructure utilized by firms like Waymo and Tesla to the broader robotics trade with out the necessity for a whole lot of engineers.
“Our imaginative and prescient is to construct the information stack and ML [machine learning] platform that each different robotics startup can use, in order that they don’t need to reinvent the wheel,” Macneil mentioned. “We need to assist each robotics firm transfer sooner.”
Foxglove’s platform is utilized by clients akin to Amazon, Anduril, Chef Robotics, Dexterity, NVIDIA, Protect AI, and numerous autonomous automobile and humanoid robotic firms.
One of many extra attention-grabbing buyer makes use of, Macneil mentioned, was Foxglove’s partnership with Protect AI. It initially used Foxglove internally however later embedded the instruments into its HiveMind autonomy stack, making Foxglove a part of the software program growth equipment (SDK) that Protect’s personal clients use.
“That was a very attention-grabbing milestone,” Macneil mentioned. “It confirmed that we’re not only a developer device, however core infrastructure for different platforms.”
Foxglove was featured in The Robotic Report’s inaugural Startup Radar, which highlights 100 robotics startups 5 years or youthful.
The Startup Radar 2025 consists of information on every firm’s market focus, measurement, funding, merchandise and extra. Obtain the Startup Radar 2025 to find who’s constructing the subsequent technology of robotics.
Dexterity saves 20% in tooling time
Dexterity, a number one logistics robotics firm, estimated that the Foxglove platform has saved it greater than 20% in growth time and $150,000 yearly in tooling and growth time.
Earlier than integrating Foxglove, Dexterity relied on in-house instruments and varied log analyzers. These instruments met the fundamental necessities, however they required fixed upkeep and lacked wealthy visualization capabilities important for environment friendly debugging and growth. The lack to file or replay visualizations and information resulted in important time wasted, developer friction, and the necessity to juggle a number of disparate instruments.
“We anticipated [the Foxglove platform to just offer] simpler visualization, however it turned out to be rather more, unlocking invaluable effectivity for all our builders,” mentioned Dexterity founding engineer Robert Solar.
A Digit humanoid robotic from Agility Robotics visualized with Foxglove. Supply: Foxglove
Traders give a vote of confidence
Bessemer Enterprise Companions led Foxglove’s Collection B spherical, with participation from present traders Eclipse and Amplify Companions. Foxglove mentioned the spherical is a vote of investor confidence at a time when many robotics firms are struggling to boost capital.
Macneil mentioned Foxglove’s broad buyer base and horizontal platform make it extra resilient than if it have been tied to a single class of robotics. The funding will enable Foxglove to develop its 50-person workforce, half of that are engineers, and speed up product growth.
“In the event you go to a Tesla or a Waymo, there are actually a whole lot of individuals constructing this type of tooling inside these firms,” mentioned Macneil. “We need to convey that high quality of infrastructure to the remainder of the robotics trade.”
Macneil in contrast immediately’s robotics infrastructure panorama to the early days of cloud computing. “Within the 2000s, the massive web firms — Google, Amazon, Fb — constructed their very own infrastructure,” he mentioned. “Then got here firms like AWS, Datadog, and Twilio that turned that inner infrastructure into developer platforms. We’re doing the identical factor for robotics.”
