Robotics Raises: Aseon Labs, H3 Zoom, Ornadyne, Rekise Marine, Seahi Robotics

We’re back with another round of notable robotics startup raises for the week of 6/22. While last week’s funding total soared well over $1 billion, this week looks quite different. We’ve got multiple interesting young startups that have just come out of stealth (shout out to the recent Y Combinator Demo Day) alongside some more established players.

Below you'll find a startup building drones that look and move like birds, multiple companies creating autonomous marine vessels, a company building infrastructure for self-driving cars, and more. We’ve got it all, land or sea, right here for you.

Aseon Labs, $500,000, Pre-Seed

Autonomous vehicles continue to improve and are starting to scale. But while humans are doing less in these robotic cars, autonomous vehicles are still cleaned and maintained in the same way as traditional gas guzzlers, by humans. Aseon Labs looks to change that.

The startup argues that autonomous vehicles should have autonomous infrastructure. The company builds essentially a box-like garage that can inspect, clean and charge these vehicles with no humans required. The startup just came out of stealth with $500,000 of funding in tow from Y Combinator.

H3 Zoom, $3.6 million, Series A

H3 Zoom is looking to make building inspection and upkeep much easier using computer vision and AI. The company’s software platform pulls data from sources like drones and uses its proprietary vision-language models to make the process autonomous with no human inspectors necessary.

The Singapore-based company recently raised a $3.6 million Series A round led by JRE Ventures with participation from M7 Holdings and Moringa Ventures, among others, as it looks to continue expanding across Asia.

Ornadyne, $500,000, Pre-Seed

Ornadyne is another Y Combinator startup coming out of stealth this week worth paying attention to. The company builds drones that look, move, and even sound like birds. These bots are only one pound and can travel up to 27 miles per hour.

The company’s pitch is that their avian design will help them move stealthfully during surveillance without drawing attention from people or alerting defense systems. Ornadyne just exited stealth with $500,000 in its nest from Y Combinator. While a great idea, aren’t all birds drones to begin with?

Rekise Marine, $9.7 million, Seed

Autonomous ocean vessels seem to be having a moment as several have been able to attract investor attention recently, including two in this very roundup. Rekise Marine is a Hyderabad, India-based startup that raised a $9.7 million seed round led by Accel and NKSQUARED.

The company builds a catalog of different boats, some of which can autonomously travel underwater solo or in coordinated fleets, full-on autonomous submarines, and vessels that can travel on top of the surface and carry passengers.

Seahi Robotics, ¥1 billion ($148 million), Pre-Series A and Series A

Seahi Robotics is also building autonomous marine vehicles of various sizes ranging from vessels that can transport passengers both above and below the surface to several smaller drone-like robots. The company originally started to build bots to clean ships and has since expanded with plans to release an AI foundation model for marine intelligence in the near future.

Seahi raised ¥1 billion ($148 million) across a Pre-Series A and a Series A round. Investors in this latest fundraise include: VertexGrowth, GSR Ventures, Yuzun Capital and China Renaissance Capital, among others.