Framework Ventures

1/Today in @FortuneMagazine:

Framework Ventures has led a $50M Series A for Ultra (@Ultraroboticsco), a company building AI-native robotics for the logistics industry.

Total funding = $62M.

Ultra is also unveiling a strategic partnership with @physical_int. 🧵👇 x.com/Ultraroboticsc…

Excited to see our partners at @Ultraroboticsco announce their $50M Series A! Ultra is a great example of what's becoming possible when general-purpose robot foundation models meet real-world deployments!

We just led a $50M Series A for Ultra (@Ultraroboticsco), bringing its total raised to $62M. Very excited to partner with @JonMSchwartz and the rest of the team!

In under a year, Ultra has deployed AI-native robots across 9 states that have packed 500k+ real orders for paying logistics customers.

Ultra is also partnering with @physical_int.

Robotics is compounding in real time thanks to the Data and Deployment layers. This week our portfolio company @MeckaAI announced its Series B, and today we are thrilled to be leading @Ultraroboticsco latest round alongside their deepening partnership with @physical_int. Welcome to the Framework physical AI portfolio: Ultra! Thesis on data and deployments in my pinned post.

Deployment is the ultimate test of robotics. At scale, it's highly non-trivial and requires getting financing, operations, manufacturing, and technology right, all at the same time. Thrilled to partner w/ @JonMSchwartz, Max, Oliver, @chetan_, and the entire @Ultraroboticsco team.

Very excited to announce that Framework is leading the $50m Series A of Ultra Robotics.

@JonMSchwartz , Chetan, Oliver and Max saw where robotics was heading early. After spending years working in 3D printing/manufacturing, they decided to bring those skills over to 3PL robotics. We were impressed by their obsession with customers and how quickly they were able to put together OP-1.

With the rise of LLMs and their ability to generalize, and the sheer scale of data being gathered to train frontier models, we believe there will be more robots than people, and we will reindustrialize. The Ultra team picked the right vertical to start and hill climb. The models get better every day, and we believe the capabilities in the next year will be unimaginable relative to where they are currently, with greater dexterity, speed and planning.

Deploying robotics is different from deploying LLMs. With software it's easy to ship a product off to many companies building on top of it. Robotics is much harder: many more supply chains, physical constraints, environmental challenges, connectivity, battery, reliability, wear and tear, temperature, etc. The real world is HARD, and the clients Ultra is fortunate to work with will all have their own challenges. Robots are capex heavy, which requires creative financing, reliability and real labor output.

We believe Ultra is stacked to handle these challenges given their speed, their obsession with customers, and the ever-improving models as the wind in their back. Thank you Jon and the rest of the team for giving us the opportunity to work together.

We've seen incredible progress in robotics over the last few years -- a cambrian explosion of low cost hardware options and the birth of scaling laws in robot intelligence -- yet deployed robots doing real work are still rare. At Ultra, we are laser focused on changing that.

There cannot be a ChatGPT moment for robotics without robots. That's why at Ultra, we're focused on the industry's biggest bottleneck: deployment.

Since the very beginning, we've chosen to deploy before it was comfortable, learning lessons that only customers and the chaos of the real world could teach us.

Those lessons became the foundation for OP1, a robot designed from the ground up for the realities of scaled deployment. Through repetition, we've built the operational muscle and knowledge needed to scale the installation, operation, and servicing of our robots. And most importantly, we've learned how to enable our customers to succeed with them.

It's easy in robotics to become completely engrossed with the robot itself. But technology only matters when it's useful to someone. The best robot is the one people can rely on every day to build, do, and achieve more.

It's time to deploy more robots.

Robotics has a distribution problem. Today, Ultra is announcing $62M in funding to solve it, including a $50M Series A led by @hiFramework.

We believe that deployment is the bottleneck in robotics.

It’s relatively easy to make a robot look impressive in a controlled environment. It’s much harder to put a robot into the open world, make it useful, keep it running, earn the trust of the people working alongside it, and do that over and over and over again.

So that’s what we’re focusing on.

Huge congrats to @MeckaAI team on their Series B led by @sequoia.

$100M run rate passed in June. They project a $300M run rate by EOY. We believe it’s become one of the most important companies in physical AI.

Framework led the Series A and we're proud to join the Series B.

Last year, we co-led the Series A for @meanwhile, the world's first Bitcoin and stablecoin life insurer.

Today, we're doubling down in their $37.5M round.

15 brokers signed across Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Underwriting income has passed last year's total and is on track to double by EOY.

Today, we're announcing $37.5M in new funding, led by @BainCapCrypto, bringing our total capital raised to over $180M.

This investment will help us expand Bitcoin-denominated life insurance to families across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

When I was at Pantera we were so happy to partner with @ztownsend and Meanwhile. Its is a pleasure to be able to continue to invest with @hiFramework doubling down in this round!

Today @meanwhile raised $37.5M from existing investors, led by @BainCapCrypto, to meet demand for BTC life insurance from families in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Anyone, anywhere should be able to build, save, and protect their wealth. Today we double down on "anywhere".

Really proud of this team. We’re building the hardware, data and research to help robots learn from human experience, and there’s a huge amount left to do. With the backing of Sequoia and others, we're making aggressive bets in bringing general purpose robots to life!

To do this, we’re hiring researchers and engineers across computer vision, platform, robotics and infrastructure. If you want to build with us, or have a research idea we should talk about, send me a message.

Thank you to everyone backing us. We’re just getting started.

A few weeks after @gradypb and @Alfred_Lin went on the show, we were finally able to tell the full story with @EdLudlow on @Bloomberg live this morning

We still don't know why the Sequoia team took 5 different flights on that red eye during the visit..

.@joshavata told us egocentric data would be the bottleneck for physical AI before the rest of the market saw it.

A year on, @MeckaAI's data is becoming core infra for the robotics stack, and the company now projects a $300M run rate by EOY.

Framework Ventures is proud to be back in for the Series B. Major congrats to the team."

Lets go!

This is cool

Was interesting convo on the show