Elementary Robotics: Elementary Robotics is a full-stack robotics company that combines hardware, computer vision, machine learning, and adaptive learning to create easy to train robots to assist humans. So far, the specifics of their robots and their use cases have been closely guarded but from what they have released, they are creating a robot that is gentler, less rigid, and more accurate using sensor systems to provide feedback. Their goal is to lower the cost to implement robots in mainstream applications while also making them easier to program for the desired task. Elementary Robotics raised a seed round of $3.6m in December 2018 from Fathom Capital, Fika Ventures, Stage Venture Partners, Riot.vc, Osage University Partners, Toyota AI Ventures, and Ubiquity Ventures.

Phiar: Phiar is building a next generation, augmented reality navigation app for drivers that simultaneously provides autonomous car startups with data from real-world drivers. Their software uses the camera and screen on a smartphone to overlay directions on the road ahead of you. They use real-time occlusion to seamlessly blend the digital and physical views. Their real value add though is the metadata they are collecting. The objects and situations that their software encounters are uploaded and the metadata is used to build map insights that can then be sold and used by autonomous car companies. They raised a seed round of $3m in November 2018 from The Venture Reality Fund, Norwest Venture Partners, Zeno Ventures, YC, Cross Culture Ventures, Anorak Ventures, and Mayfield Fund.

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