As robotics technologist Mike Dooley saw his aging mother go from using a cane, to a walker, to a wheelchair to move around, he noticed something. “Once you start using that cane or walker, your hands become your extra pair of legs,” he told dot.LA. “You're using them to stabilize yourself.”
Dooley, who had a hand in developing popular robots like the Roomba vacuum cleaner, co-founded Calabasas-based Labrador Systems in 2017 to help people with mobility issues eat, do household tasks and live independently at home. On Tuesday, the startup announced that it raised an additional $3.1 million in seed funding led by Amazon and iRobot Ventures, bringing its total amount raised to date to $5.5 million. The funding will go toward growing the company’s engineering team and accelerating its manufacturing efforts.
Additionally, Labrador introduced two personal robots, the Retriever and the Caddie, that it is unveiling at this week’s CES 2022 trade show in Las Vegas. The robots are small, height-adjustable machines that can carry food, laundry and other household items weighing up to 25 pounds. They can also be commanded through an app on a user’s smartphone or through voice commands via an Alexa-enabled device.
“A lot of these things that we take for granted—that we think are simple, that we forget that we do—become really challenging,” Dooley, who serves as Labrador’s CEO, said of his company’s mission to make life easier for those in need of household assistance. “They basically become parts of losing your independence.”
The startup joins an ever-growing ecosystem of firms developing home technology for aging and disabled populations. Amazon’s Alexa division launched an elder care subscription package in December that aims to help families keep track of elder relatives remotely. Kinova, a Canada-based robotics company, offers robotic arm products that help those with mobility issues pick up objects and eat independently.
“Any of these technologies are good even if they’re not applicable right now,” said Ramin Ramezani, the chief technologist at the UCLA Center for SMART Health. “It’s one more step towards having better assisted-care technology. Our world is aging, and we need to come up with better technologies to help people who are aging.”
Labroator leverages consumer-facing technology traditionally applied to AR and VR applications to train its robots to map out and navigate a single-level space. Sensors on all four sides of the robots, facing downwards and at eye level, help it maneuver through spaces at least 28 inches wide.
“We have a robot that's basically able to retrieve things in a structured way and bring them to you,” Dooley said. “And the whole goal is, if we can bring it within 12 or 18 inches of you, just keeping it within that range is a world of difference.”
The company began trialing its technology in peoples’ homes in 2021 and is now accepting reservations for its robots, with the goal of reaching full production next year. The price of a Labrador robot starts at a $1,500 flat fee, plus a monthly subscription of $99 a month. The company eventually hopes to leverage insurance buy-in to make the cost of its technology cheaper for consumers.
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The new funds bring the total Inspectiv has raised to $16.6 million since its 2018 launch. Founder and chairman Joseph Melika told dot.LA the company’s recent growth has largely been steered by the pandemic as companies put a higher value on data security.
The heightened need for better security, according to Melika, is due to recent changes in how people work. “Just people, frankly, getting distracted,” he said, has made some businesses more vulnerable to hackers.
“They’re working remotely, their laptops are from home [with] no firewall,” he said, adding that has left a lot of systems potentially exposed to hacks.
Inspectiv’s risk management platform runs autonomously 24/7 and is constantly scanning for threats, Melika said. The software isn’t just run on A.I., it's also combined with a network of security researchers. Melika said part of Inspectiv’s intelligence comes from the input of thousands of researchers.
Once it finds a threat, the software alerts Inspectiv, whose vulnerability spot-checkers verify it and identify it to the client. Then, Inspectiv scans its other clients for the same threat, or similar invasions that could be lurking. There’s also the potential for the software to review backup files, in case a company wants to make sure no older resolved threats spring back to life.
Melika pointed out several current Inspectiv clients using its software are local, including GoGuardian, maternal care company Mahmee and Minehut, a platform for people to host custom “Minecraft” servers.
The funding round was led by StepStone Group, among a suite of existing Inspectiv investors including Westwood-based Fika Ventures, San Francisco’s Freestyle Capital and Santa Monica-based Mucker Capital.
CEO Ryan Disraeli (left) and Founder and Chairman Joseph Melika (right)
Courtesy of Inspectiv
Inspectiv also announced a leadership transition this week alongside several new hires – former CEO and co-founder of fraud prevention service Telesign Ryan Disraeli will take the reins as CEO of Inspectiv, while Melika will remain on board as the company’s board chairman.
“Inspectiv is really helping secure the internet, and that was something that personally I could get passionate about,” Disraeli said. “To be able to work with a team of people that we brought in that also has that security background, but also experience scaling up organizations was a pretty exciting opportunity.”
The company also hired Karen Nguyen as chief revenue officer, Ray Espinoza as chief information security officer and Ross Hendrickson to be vice president of engineering. Disraeli said the Inspectiv team is currently 22 people but the company is “adding aggressively to that number” by expanding its product development team.
Disraeli wouldn’t disclose revenues but told dot.LA he’s confident he can grow Inspectiv quickly.
“There's a lot of companies raising money that don't have customers and don't have real growth,” Disraeli said. “This is a company that has real customers that are growing and growing with us.”
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