‘No one’s gonna buy a robot’: How Andromeda’s co-founder Grace Brown overcame VC rejections
After facing difficulties in raising funding, which forced it to adopt a lean operating model, the Melbourne robotics startup is on the brink of announcing a seed round.
You'd expect that building a troop of humanoid robots would be a pricey project — especially ones that interact, recall and even emote like humans. But Andromeda’s co-founder Grace Brown has done exactly that, developing multiple prototypes over more than two years, with just $1 million in outside funding.
Andromeda’s robot, named Abi, is designed to combat loneliness and isolation among the elderly, as well as children in hospitals and care centres. Using advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to learn from its interactions with humans, Abi can recognise faces, respond to questions and express emotions in a way that encourages residents to engage socially and physically.
But Brown, whose company is now on the brink of announcing a seed round, having landed a pre-seed raise led by Galileo Ventures last year, said Andromeda's low-cost model wasn’t by design.
She spoke to Capital Brief as part of our In The Arena series, in which we speak to startups and founders about the biggest challenges they've faced — and how they overcame them.
