The $10 million will be used to grow head count - current at five - to around 20 to 25, almost exclusively engineers. Given the extremely early stage, Collaborative is referring to the funding as a seed round, though Porter’s involvement certainly brings some immediate clout out of the gate. I think what’s needed now to be competitive is something that’s much more flexible, that can go into odd-shaped buildings without a huge amount of infrastructure.” “We could design the square footage, we can put fences up, we could customize the process paths around the robots. “Amazon has the advantage of putting things into 800,000-square-foot buildings,” says Porter. We think the Tesla bots are hard and a long ways off.”Īs companies have looked to eke out a competitive edge against the Amazon behemoth, microfulfillment - which places warehouses even closer to consumers for faster delivery - is becoming an increasingly important topic. “The way I tend to describe it is, if you’ve got Elon Musk’s Tesla bot on one end of the spectrum, and you’ve got these low-profile AMR (autonomous mobile robot) purpose-built robots that just move a pallet around on the other, we think there’s something much more pragmatic in the middle. “I’m intentionally not really wanting to talk more about the company than the specific robot,” says Porter. What it definitely won’t look like, however, is Tesla’s theoretically forthcoming Optimus robot. “So we’re starting a company to build that.”Īs it’s only 3 months old at the moment, Collaborative isn’t quite ready to discuss what such a piece of hardware might practically look like. “We don’t think that there is an equivalent capability to the six-degree-of-freedom robotic art that’s generally collaborative, works with humans and can meet a wide variety of use cases,” Porter said on a call with TechCrunch. Porter mentions the six-degrees-of-freedom robotic arm as being the closest industrial robotics have to a universal and versatile piece of hardware. Based in Santa Clara, California, the brand-new startup managed to snag the extremely simple name Collaborative Robotics and the accompanying URL, co.bot - a reference to the commonly used portmanteau abbreviation, cobot.īoth point to the HRI (human-robot interaction) at the center of the company’s mission. The project - which has, thus far, been listed as “More to Come” on his LinkedIn profile - comes out of stealth today, alongside a $10 million raise, led by Neo and featuring Khosla Ventures, Calibrate Ventures and 1984 Ventures. Porter spent just under 2 years as the CTO of Scale AI, before launching his own venture this March.
In a discussion with TechCrunch, the executive cited his young family and wanting to be closer to his wife’s relatives in the Bay Area as factors. But after 13 years of rising in the ranks to become the vice president and distinguished engineer of Amazon Robotics, Brad Porter opted to step away in August 2020. If anything, COVID-19 and its fallout have accelerated the category. The company’s deployment of hundreds of thousands of robotics systems across American fulfillment centers has become a gold standard for industrial automation - and a model of disruption that’s helped fuel an industry of like-minded startups. After years of work, numerous acquisitions and millions spent, could the retail giant’s massive investment in automation help keep things running amid the biggest pandemic in a century? The answer was, decidedly, yes. Sony completed a separate deal with Netflix for films released in 2022 and beyond, so it's possible that "Spider-Man: No Way Home" will end up on Netflix after the initial release window with Starz is over.The pandemic was a moment of truth for Amazon Robotics.
You can subscribe directly to Starz for $9 a month new members get a one-week free trial. Starz CEO Jeffrey Hirsch recently said "Spider-Man: No Way Home" should be available on Starz within the next six months. " Spider-Man: Homecoming" is available on Starz right now too. Instead, "Spider-Man: No Way Home" is set to make its subscription video debut on Starz, the cable network and streaming service.
Sony's streaming contracts for films like "Spider-Man: No Way Home" will keep it off Disney Plus and Is 'Spider-Man: No Way Home' coming to Disney Plus or Netflix? If you purchase the film, you can stream it whenever you'd like with no expiration date.īlu-ray and 4K Blu-ray versions of "Spider-Man: No Way Home" were released on April 12 for collectors who prefer a physical copy of the film.
After you hit play, you get 48 hours to finish the film before the rental expires.
When you rent a movie from a VOD service, you typically get 30 days to start watching it.