What You Should Know:
– Diligent Robotics raises over $30M to deploy its collaborative robots to healthcare systems across the nation.
– Company plans to use the funding will accelerate product development to meet the demand for healthcare service robots and enhance interoperability, integrations and efficiency in healthcare institutions.
Diligent Robotics, an Austin, TX-based robotic automation company today announced it has closed over $30 million in Series B funding led by Tiger Global, bringing the total investment raised to date to nearly $50 million. Diligent also maintains the support of existing investors, including True Ventures, DNX Venture, Ubiquity Ventures, E14 Fund, Next Coast Ventures, Boom Capital, Gaingels as well as additional commitments from new investors including Cedars-Sinai Health Ventures.
Creating Robot Assistants that Help Healthcare Workers with Routine Tasks
Founded in 2017, Diligent Robotics is the leading company in the social robotics space and the first to build a unique robot with social intelligence and mobile manipulation capabilities to help people in their work environments. In 2018, the company debuted Moxi, a collaborative robot assistant that assists clinical staff with routine, not-patient-facing tasks including fetching and delivering supplies, medications, or lab samples. Since launching and integrating into several healthcare systems, Moxi demonstrated improvement in overall clinical flows and gave care team members back valuable time to spend with their patients.
“We are proud to have the full support of our past investors and welcome our new partners who joined during our Series B raise,” said Dr. Andrea Thomaz, co-founder of Diligent Robotics. “This new round of funding will help us scale the company to meet the incredible demand for our healthcare service robot. Thanks to the support of our investors and the Diligent team, we are focused on expanding automated support for clinical teams so nurses and clinicians can focus on tasks that matter most, patient care.”
Moxi Helps Hospitals Run 24/7
Moxi is joined by Diligent’s implementation team that can add any number of operational workflows customized for your workspace in as little as 12 weeks. Designed to be compatible with the busy, semi-structured environments of hospitals, Moxi’s core technical features include:
– Social intelligence: opens elevators and doors on its own, won’t bump into people or objects in hallways, happily poses for selfies
– Mobile manipulation: Moxi can grab, pull, open and guide objects, with no human assistance
– Human-guided learning: The more your staff uses Moxi, the more Moxi learns and adapts to your environment and way of doing things
Recent Milestones Since Series A Round
In the two years since its Series A funding, Diligent Robotics has achieved several milestones including:
– Moving from prototype to commercial deployment: Between 2018 and 2019, Diligent partnered with four health systems in Texas to complete a series of research trials. The team incorporated the learnings and demonstrated the commercial value of their robotic technology, incorporating direct feedback from care teams to shape how Moxi fits into clinical workflows today. The first commercial deployments of Moxi started in 2020.
– Moxi utilization and use cases with initial customers: Diligent saw initial success with early customers as nurses quickly adopted Moxi into their workflows. As Moxi is joining more teams, Diligent sees a consistent need to support clinical staff to offload a diverse set of tasks that interrupt a nurse’s day, including sending and picking up things from the lab, delivering teleboxes, managing the “do not tube” medications, picking up patient’s personal items or transferring pumps or other light-weight equipment from unit to unit. Now that Moxi is fully deployed and integrated into a diverse set of health systems across the nation from multi-location systems to smaller community hospitals or large academic and research-focused health systems, the demand is skyrocketing. Chief Nursing Officers from all sizes of healthcare institutions want to understand robotic solutions and how Diligent can help their clinical staff during the nursing shortage crisis.
– Began commercial organization build-out: To support the high demand, Diligent quickly expanded their talented team across the entire business from operations, sales and engineering.
