Rice Robotics gets $7 million pre-Series A funding round from SoftBank and other companies. They include Alibaba Entrepreneur Fund, Soul Capital, Audacy Ventures, Sun Hung Kai & Company, and Cyberport HK as reported by Techcrunch. There’s no lead investor in the round.
Rice’s robots have been delivering 7-Eleven products to Softbank staff at the company’s new headquarters in Takeshiba, Tokyo. These robots are capable of carrying a 30kg payload and have a storage space of 39 x 27 x 34 cm.
Rice effectively allows delivery workers to simply drop off customer orders at a designated spot for its robots to fetch, eliminating the need for them to navigate in and out of office buildings. The robots can operate continuously for 12 hours and recharge within one hour.
The financing, said Rice, will allow it to push further into Japan, which is now the company’s biggest source of revenue. Aside from SoftBank, Rice also counts Toyota, Japan Post and Mitsui Group among its Japanese clients.
With a starting market price of $9,000, Rice’s robots utilize the popular simultaneous localization and mapping technology, known as SLAM, for navigation.
A big advantage of SLAM is that it continuously compares sensor data with the given map, allowing the system to construct an accurate and on-the-fly model of the environment and estimate a robot’s precise location.
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