The Robotics Revolution: Why This Is the Golden Age for Startups Beyond AI Hype

Artificial General Intelligence robot with a glowing circuit brain. | Image Credits: Yuichiro Chino / Getty Images

When Seth Winterroth left his job at GE Ventures to help launch Eclipse in 2015, robotics was on his mind. Or more specifically, the number of early-stage robotics startups that were struggling to launch due to lack of interest.

"These are teams that had just finished their postdocs at Waterloo, or CMU, or MIT and were starting robotics companies, and the refrain that I continually heard from the startups was, 'Hey, we're having a really hard time raising institutional venture capital,'" Winterroth told TechCrunch. "At the time in Silicon Valley, most venture capital was going into the very mature application layer or the application layer of some very mature computing platforms."

A lot has changed since then.

Now, after investing in robotics startups for 10 years, Winterroth, a partner at Eclipse, said the time to invest in robotics has never been better. The robotics startup market has matured and the hardware and software powering these bots has gotten significantly better — and cheaper.

Venture investing in the category is gaining momentum as well. Investors poured $6 billion into robotics startups in the first seven months of 2025 according to Crunchbase data. The data company predicts that this year's funding totals will eclipse 2024, making it one of the only non-AI categories to experience a boost in funding.

While one could argue that robotics is seeing a surge in investor interest because of AI — and it's not wrong to acknowledge AI's role in the advancement of robotic tech — investors who have focused on the category longer than the last few years said the industry didn't get to this point just because of advancements in AI over the past few years.

The real catalyst for the industry to start gaining momentum actually happened back in 2012, Winterroth said, when Kiva Systems, a small startup based out of Massachusetts, got acquired by Amazon.

"I like to say Kiva Systems' acquisition was the acquisition that launched 1,000 robotic startups," Winterroth said. "Between 2011 and 2015, 2016, that really was the case. You just saw a number of different new companies get started. Some like 6 River Systems, or Clearpath Robotics, were successful, but most were not. But that talent learns and that learning compounds, and it's brought into the next set of ventures."

This first wave helped attract engineers to the sector and helped companies figure out product-market-fit, he said.

Kira Noodleman, a partner at Bee Partners, echoed this. Noodleman told TechCrunch the last decade of trial and error helped startups figure out what the market is actually looking for when it comes to robotics and automation.