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ABB VC Unit Invests in Vicarious Artificial Intelligence

November 09, 2014 by Jeff Shepard

ABB Group has invested in artificial intelligence research company Vicarious, Inc. through its venture capital unit ABB Technology Ventures. Vicarious has been developing a unified algorithmic architecture to achieve human-level intelligence in vision, language and motor control. The San Francisco-based company is focusing on visual perception problems, like recognition, segmentation and scene parsing. ABB was part of a group of investors that put $12 million into the latest fund-raising round for the San Francisco-based company. Girish Nadkarni, head of ABB's venture capital unit, said it invested less than $10 million. Overall, Vicarious has raised over $70 million.

“This partnership is a perfect fit. ABB is a pioneer in the robotics industry, with a global installed base of more 250,000 industrial robots to improve productivity, quality and worker safety, while Vicarious has positioned itself to do the same for AI,” said Girish Nadkarni, Head of ABB Technology Ventures. “Robotics technology has reached the point where it can perform many tasks that are challenging or unsafe for humans. The combination of robots and artificial intelligence offers great opportunities for the future.

“What this is doing is developing human intelligence in machines,” Nadkarni continued. “It’s a complex system, still in an R&D phase. But early results are very positive.”

“ABB brings unique expertise in robotics and manufacturing,” said Vicarious co-founder D. Scott Phoenix. “We are in the midst of a remarkable era for robot innovation, with many new applications that could not have been imagined even a few years ago. Vicarious is excited about where this partnership will take us in the years ahead,” added Vicarious co-founder Dr. Dileep George.

Since launching in 2010, Vicarious has raised nearly $70 million from investors including among others Mark Zuckerberg, Jerry Yang, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel, in support of the company’s long-term research goals.