THE ESSENTIALS IN 30 SECONDS

  • Tutor Intelligence announced a $75 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz, which takes total funding to about $117 million.
  • Its Cassie and Sonny robots share one vision-language-action model, Ti0, trained partly on data from remote human operators.
  • a16z says Tutor aims to have more than 1,000 robots under contract by the end of 2027 and sells robot work with hourly pricing.

Tutor Intelligence, a robotics company spun out of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, announced on November 2 a $75 million Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz. According to the announcement's headline, the money will go toward training its frontier robot model, manufacturing robots and deploying them. Added to the $42 million it had raised in total up to its Series A last December, total funding comes to roughly $117 million. Other participants and the valuation were not disclosed in the material available.

Deploy first, automate later

Founded in 2021 by Josh Gruenstein, the chief executive, and Alon Kosowsky-Sachs, the chief technology officer, the company is now headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts. Its approach, as described in a16z's investment note, is to place robots in real factories and warehouses before they are fully autonomous. Remote human operators, which Tutor calls "tutors," step in to teleoperate or correct the machines, and the data from those sessions feeds the robot model, which is meant to cut costs and widen capabilities over time.

Customers pay for robot work by the hour, a pricing model the investor says shifts spending from capital to operating budgets and makes automation accessible to smaller businesses. In December, SiliconANGLE described the offer as a robot-as-a-service subscription aimed both at Fortune 500 logistics groups and at small manufacturers.

Two robots, one model

In September Tutor introduced its second-generation machines. Cassie is a large single-arm robot for case picking and palletising that can lift 50 pounds and is now mobile; Sonny is a two-armed, semi-humanoid robot for finer tasks such as moving small items between bins. Both run Ti0, a vision-language-action model with 4.5 billion parameters, according to SiliconANGLE. The company also runs Data Factory 1, a site with 100 Sonny robots supervised by remote workers in the US, Mexico and the Philippines, Manufacturing Dive reported in May.

What to watch

a16z says Tutor plans to have more than 1,000 robots under contract by the end of 2027, that nearly a third of customers who received robots in the past year came back for more, and that installation can take as little as eight hours. These are investor and company statements; Tutor has not named customers or disclosed revenue, and the share of tasks its robots handle without human help remains unclear.