Knightscope, a US-based company that specialises in security-specific robotics, will use the seed funding to start beta testing products. It aims to be testing it on two, unnamed ‘major’ clients in Silicon Valley. The company believes that by testing its products at corporate campuses, vacant warehouses, schools, hotels, stadiums, and airports, they would be able to take robotics to a much more mainstream market. In order to “predict and prevent crime”, the company has developed the K5 Autonomous Data Machine, a five foot tall robot that is able to detect crime.
The company’s co-founder, William Santana Li, made the announcement at the Launch Festival in San Francisco.
Describing the K-5’s functioning, Knightscope’s website says: “The Knightscope K5 Autonomous Data Machine utilizes a combination of autonomous robots and predictive analytics to provide a commanding but friendly physical presence while gathering important real-time on-site data with numerous sensors.”
“Data collected through these sensors is processed through our predictive analytics engine, combined with existing business, government and crowdsourced social data sets, and subsequently assigned an alert level that determines when the community and the authorities should be notified of a concern.”
The company was able to secure $10,000 in seed funding earlier in 2013. Knightscope was also a part of the Insurance Accelerator at the Plug and Play Tech Center and was a part of the Tech Centre’s Expo.