Foxglove, a startup building an infrastructure stack for robotics, announced that it raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Eclipse Ventures.
According to Foxglove, robotics data is fundamentally different from traditional unstructured or structured time-series data. Robots must process and store many parallel streams of data, and a single robot may host multiple cameras, lidar, IMU, and other sensors, while simultaneously monitoring perception, planning, and control output. In addition, this all must run in compute- and bandwidth-constrained environments such as a warehouse or farm.
To develop and debug robot behavior, engineers need the ability to inspect three-dimensional robot state, pause and replay recorded data, and step frame-by-frame through the complex output of ML models and algorithms. We’ve found this workflow to be remarkably similar across robotics applications and companies.
When scaling robotics development beyond a few engineers, it becomes critical to optimize this lifecycle of robotics data, from logging to ingestion, discovery, and analysis, to unblock engineering teams and maximize the pace of development. Unfortunately, immature companies often find themselves with a disorganized “data swamp” and no visibility into what they have stored or who has access to it.
Foxglove is building the data stack for robotics. Its platform combines open-source robot logging, data lake management, and visualization to streamline common robotics development workflows, increase collaboration, and ultimately help companies get robots to market faster. The company's products are used by thousands of engineers, product managers, and operations teams, and we’re transforming development at some of the top companies across a range of industries, from autonomous vehicles (NVIDIA), logistics (6 River Systems), and autonomous forklifts (Third Wave Automation), to lawn mowing, sidewalk delivery, undersea exploration, fulfillment, and defense.
