Diligent Robotics Raises $30M+ to Deploy its Robots to Healthcare Systems
April 11, 2022
Austin, Texas-based Diligent Robotics has announced it raised more than $30 million in a Series B funding round, bringing the total investment in its company to more than $50 million. The company is developing socially intelligent service robots and artificial intelligent solutions that enable robots to collaborate within and adapt to human environments.
The company’s flagship product, Moxi, is a robot that performs delivery tasks for frontline healthcare teams. While stress and burnout has been a persistent problem in healthcare for years, the past two years of COVID-19 has accelerated this crisis, with projections of more than 1 million new nurses needed in the U.S. alone.
The funding was led by Tiger Global, with support of existing investors True Venture,s DNX Venture, Ubiquity Ventures, E14 Fund, Next Coast Ventures, Boom Capital, Gaingels as well as commitments from new investors, including Cedars-Sinai Health Ventures. Diligent said funds raised during this round will help them optimize the supply chain and design teams for faster robot deployment. The company will continue to enhance interoperability and drive integrations with existing hospital infrastructure, electronic health records and clinical communications, which will help them continue to meet demands during the persistent nursing shortage.
“We are proud to have the full support of our past investors and welcome our new partners who joined during our Series B raise,” said Andrea Thomaz, co-founder of Diligent Robotics. “This new round of funding will help us scale the company to meet the incredible demand for our healthcare service robot. Thanks to the support of our investors and the Diligent team, we are focused on expanding automated support for clinical teams so nurses and clinicians can focus on tasks that matter most, patient care.”
The company was founded in 2017, building a unique robot with social intelligence and mobile manipulation capabilities to help people in their work environments. In 2018, the company debuted Moxi, a collaborative robot assistant that helps clinical staff with routine, not-patient-facing tasks including fetching and delivering supplies, medications, or lab samples. Since launching and integrating into several healthcare systems, Moxi has demonstrated improvement in overall clinical flows and given care team members back valuable time to spend with patients.
“We started implementing Moxi into our clinical workflows in December and planned on going through a trial phase to determine if the technology would be helpful to our staff,” said Cody Blankenship, vice president of performance improvement at Mary Washington Healthcare. “Right away, we could see the impact Moxi made on the efficiency of our staff and morale immediately increased. We were so impressed with what Moxi took off our team’s hands, we chose to add even more robots to our fleet.”
In the two years since its Series A funding, Diligent Robotics said it has achieve several milestones, including:
- Moving from prototype to commercial deployment: The company partnered with four health systems in Texas to complete a series of research trials. Commercial deployments of Moxi began in 2020.
- Utilization and use cases with initial customers: Diligent said it saw initial success with early customers as nurses quickly adopted Moxi into their workflows. As the robot is joining more teams, the company said it sees a consistent need to support clinical staff to offload a diverse set of tasks that interrupt a nurse’s day, including sending and picking up things from the lab, delivering teleboxes, managing the “do not tube” medications, picking up patient’s personal items or transferring pumps or other lightweight equipment between units.
- Began commercial organization buildout: To support increased demand for Moxi, Diligent said it has expanded its team across the entire business, including operations, sales and engineering.
“Robotic automation technology will be the key to optimizing efficiency and productivity in health care operations,” said Connie Lee, a partner at Tiger Global. “As a leader in robotic technology, Diligent Robotics has been able to scale to meet demand while developing an impressive product that delivers tremendous value for its customers. We are excited to partner with Diligent Robotics as their positive impact on the healthcare system grows.”
For more details on Diligent Robotics and its Moxi robot, visit its website here.
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