“This robot is the gold standard for doing this as it kills any virus because it’s a robot that won’t miss a place,” he said. “When someone checks out of a quarantine hotel, you can send the robot in first and the robot can disinfect everything. When the cleaner comes, the cleaner won’t get COVID-19 because all the germs have already disappeared. “
Wyatt said using the robot should help prevent COVID-19 from leaking out of hotels by cleaners and hotel workers exposed to the virus.
“This is something that would absolutely prevent that,” he said. “We certainly see it as something that would protect the cleaners and thus the community accordingly.”
August Robotics is launching the robot, which Wyatt said was developed “at warp speed” in Hong Kong, where the startup is located, and the company expects to launch it in Australia over the next two months bring.
“As a boy from Melbourne and a proud Australian, Australia is the market I want to reach and we just have to overcome the travel problems,” said Wyatt. “If I could get on a plane tomorrow and come to Melbourne and take it off tomorrow, I would.”
August Robotics is demonstrating the robot to Australian hotel chains next month and would also like to speak to government departments.
August Robotics Diego Robots.
Ms. Jackson, who runs Skip Capital, said she invested in August Robotics because she was impressed by Mr. Wyatt and “very excited” about the potential of the Diego robot.
“You have to open the door for the robot, but pretty much unlike that, the robot can navigate its way around the room, cleaning the bedroom, cleaning the bathroom,” she said. “So you can feel safe while traveling.”
August Robotics manufactures the robots on request and offers them as a service. Instead of selling them to customers, the company charges customers an ongoing usage fee that includes the cost of supporting and maintaining the robots.
Mr. Wyatt started the startup in 2018 and while August Robotics’ first robot, Lionel, which marks lines for trade shows, is “pausing” due to the disruption to trade shows caused by the pandemic, Mr. Wyatt said he “will be back with one Revenge ”once the sector has recovered.
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Rick Baker of Blackbird Ventures said the latest round of investments, which brings August Robotics’ total investment to $ 17.5 million and valued the startup at $ 39.3 million, said “lots of capital” to expand and build the next robot cohort offers.
“Their idea is to use robots to do dirty, dangerous and boring tasks that humans just have to do but don’t like to do,” he said.
“And the idea here is to build a number of industrial robots to do those jobs.”
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Cara is the small business editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald in Melbourne
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