Tutor Intelligence, a robotics company spun out of MIT’s computer science and AI lab, has raised $75m in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz, taking its total funding to $117m. Union Square Ventures and Neo, which led its earlier rounds, also took part.
The Massachusetts company’s two robot models, Sonny and Cassie, lift, move and handle consumer goods such as cereals, snacks, cosmetics and toys in US manufacturing and logistics sites. Remote human operators, which the company calls “tutors”, direct the robots, and Tutor says each deployment helps improve the models used across its whole fleet.
Customers do not buy the robots. They pay by the hour or by the pick, with no upfront cost or long-term contract, while Tutor handles installation, maintenance and software updates. The company says its robots now work in almost four times as many facilities as a year ago, and it is aiming for more than 1,000 robots under contract by the end of 2027, all built and deployed in the US. It did not name customers or give a current robot count.
Why it matters: paying for robot labour the way a business pays a staffing agency lowers the barrier for warehouses that cannot justify buying automation outright, and remote tutoring is one practical way to get robots doing useful work before they can handle every task alone.