US-based waste recycling robot developer AMP Robotics obtained $16m yesterday in a series A round involving Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP), an infrastructure-focused offshoot of technology conglomerate Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs.
Sequoia Capital led the round, which also included Congruent Ventures, the venture capital fund backed by University of California, private equity firm BV Investment Partners and investment and advisory platform Closed Loop Partners. SIP is also backed by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.
Founded in 2015 and previously called Cognitive Robotics, AMP markets a robotics system called AMP Cortex that automatically sorts waste for recycling, using computer vision and machine learning to identify the characteristics of each material.
The robot extracts data from images of the waste operation to inform insights into the client’s recycling workflow. It is able to handle municipal waste and e-waste, as well as debris from construction or demolition sites.
AMP’s technology is already fitted at multiple recycling plants in the US, and the latest funding will help scale its operations and build new artificial intelligence-driven recycling products.
Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia Capital, will join the company’s board of directors.
AMP previously received $3.2m of equity from undisclosed investors in late 2017, according to a regulatory filing, in what was likely a seed round. Sidewalk Labs, Congruent, BV and Closed Loop were all identified as existing shareholders.
Mike Delucia, principal at Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, said: “Our team is proud to have backed AMP since its very earliest stages in the seed round through Sidewalk Labs, and we are thrilled to make AMP Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners’ first investment, and to help AMP scale rapidly, because we believe that their proprietary technology will fundamentally transform the infrastructure of recycling to make it both more economic and more sustainable.”
– A version of this article first appeared on our sister site, Global University Venturing.