Tutor Intelligence, a robotics company based in Watertown, Massachusetts, has raised a $75 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz to train its robot foundation model and build more of its warehouse and factory robots. The round brings Tutor Intelligence's total funding to $117 million, with Union Square Ventures, which led the Series A, and Neo, which led the seed round, also participating.
Tutor Intelligence said the money will go to frontier robot foundation model training and to manufacturing and deploying its two robots, Sonny and Cassie. The company did not disclose its valuation or revenue.
Tutor's pitch is that robot work should be bought the way businesses buy labor. Customers pay by the hour or by the pick, with no upfront purchase and no long-term contract. Tutor handles deployment and maintenance and regularly sends upgraded software to the fleet.
Key facts
- 01Tutor Intelligence raised a $75M Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing total funding to $117M.
- 02Union Square Ventures (Series A lead) and Neo (seed lead) also participated in the round.
- 03Customers pay by the hour or by the pick, with no upfront purchase and no long-term contract.
- 04Tutor robots now work in almost 4x as many facilities as a year ago.
- 05The company expects more than 1,000 robots under contract by the end of 2027, all built in the US.
The robots run Tutor's own models and work with input from remote human operators the company calls tutors. Completed tasks generate real-world data that feeds back into training. Co-founder and CEO Josh Gruenstein has said data collected by the Sonny fleet trains the company's largest and most capable robot foundation models.
“Tutor's insight is that deployment isn't just the destination for robotics research—it's how you overcome its limitations.”— Raghu Raghuram, General partner at Andreessen Horowitz
The two machines do different jobs. Cassie is a mobile robotic arm on a four-wheeled platform that moves packages between pallets and containers at up to 18 items per minute, using a vacuum gripper rated for more than 50 pounds. Sonny is a two-armed wheeled robot that picks items from warehouse shelves and packs them, using time-of-flight and stereo cameras for depth.
Sonny's models learn new tasks by imitation, with human experts demonstrating through remotely controlled robots in a facility with more than 100 robots. Cassie learns to handle new package types automatically. Tutor plans to extend Sonny to industrial assembly and equipment maintenance.
Tutor's robots are deployed across US manufacturing and logistics networks, handling consumer goods including cereals, snacks, candy, cosmetics, home goods and toys. They now operate in almost four times as many facilities as a year ago, and nearly a third of organizations that received Tutor robots in the past 12 months were existing customers adding more.
“And the demand is there. We can hardly build robots fast enough.”— Josh Gruenstein, Co-founder and CEO of Tutor Intelligence
Tutor Intelligence started out of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and was co-founded by Gruenstein and Alon Kosowsky-Sachs. The company expects more than 1,000 robots under contract by the end of 2027, all built and deployed in the US.
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