Viam Launchpad aims to accelerate robotics deployments

Google — viam provides a software platform to ease robotics development. Billion-dollar valuations and groundbreaking technology continue to outpace yesterday’s innovations at warp speed.

At the same time, too many brilliant entrepreneurs are languishing in taking their ideas from the lab to market. These startups, led by domain experts, are on a mission to automate their industries. However, they get stuck in ROS purgatory, unable to turn pilots into revenue-generating bots. In 2020, Eliot Horowitz set out to create a better way to build and deploy smart machines. Drawing on his experience as co-founder and chief technology officer of MongoDB, Horowitz created Viam, a universal software abstraction layer for building and deploying hardware systems across enterprise fleets, or, as the company describes it, “The harness for physical AI.” “In the past, robotics startups needed years of R&D and were faced with building a huge amount of infrastructure to make a project something more than a science experiment,” said Horowitz. “What we see with Viam is that a small team starting from zero can prototype in weeks or months, iterate, deploy, and capture real business with incredible velocity by leveraging Viam’s tools and harness for physical AI. We’re incredibly excited to be providing the ingredients needed to grow this new wave of robotics.” From left: Florian Pestoni of InOrbit, Oliver Mitchell of Arkenstone Capital, Tiq Chapa of Google Cloud, and Betsy Mulé of F-Prime, at RobOpsCon’s VC panel. Horowitz and entrepreneur Nicole Maffeo co-founded Gambit. Now, Maffeo is taking her computer vision-based cooking guidance platform into a fully automated kitchen, complete with two robot arms located in the range vent to mix and stir an array of gourmet recipes. Maffeo recently shared her experience working with Horowitz’s platform: “Partnering with the Viam engineering team over the last couple of years has truly catapulted Gambit forward. By pairing robust, enterprise-grade infrastructure with adaptable custom modules, the architecture empowers our team to transition seamlessly from initial hardware prototypes to real-world deployments. From telemetry and remote debugging to fleet management in field operations, Viam delivers the essential building blocks that allow us to move at incredible velocity.” Conceptual design of Gambit’s robotic kitchen built on Viam’s software. This six-month intensive program empowers founders with the technical and business tools to take their concepts from napkin drawings to commercial implementation. As the advising executive director of the Launchpad, I can attest that the culmination of this incubator is not demo day, but installation day. This is possible because we fully immerse teams in Viam with usage credits, engineering support, and office space in the heart of New York City.