The UK’s first dedicated venture capital fund for robotics startups is targeting the activity in Bristol.
“The fund that we are launching is the first specialist fund aimed at robotics in the UK,” says Dominic Keen, CEO of High Growth Robotics (pictured right) who will run the British Robotics Seed Fund.
“It is now feasible for a small team to work for a couple of years to create a good prototype with a budget of a few hundred thousand pounds”
“The plan is to fund up to 12 UK-based startups each year who are focussing in on robotics applications. It’s a relatively broad definition of robotics – any system with physical manipulation or sensing,” he tells us. “A lot of the systems will have a heavy AI element to them but rather than virtual AI we are looking at the end applications.”
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The fund is backed by Sapphire Capital Partners, and Keen is looking to work with the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) to support early stage startups. BRL, a joint venture between the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England, is the largest robotics lab in Europe and is based at UWE’s Frenchay campus. It hosts the Future Space startup incubator as well as two key UK projects on the driverless cars, Venturer and…