Robotics data analytics platform Alloy has raised $4.5 million in pre-seed funding.
The round was led by Blackbird Ventures with support from Airtree, US-based robotics VC Xtal Ventures, and Skip Capital, as well as strategic angel investors that include senior engineering leaders and founders from Waymo, Tesla, Halter, Reach Robotics, and Carbon Robotics. The co-founders of Eucalyptus also chipped in.
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Founded in Sydney in early 2025 by CEO Joe Harris, previously CCO at Eucalyptus, Alloy cuts the time robotics teams spend sifting through data to solve problems and build expensive custom infrastructure from scratch.
Harris said the platform lets them automatically organise, search and analyse across all types of robot data using natural language.
“When robot failures occur, engineers spend days manually hunting through hundreds of files to diagnose edge cases, searching for needles in a data haystack,” he said.
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“When we talk to robotics companies, they often tell us they have to leave behind 99% of their data. I just sit there wondering – how do you know which 1% is the right 1%?. At the moment, it’s mostly based on people on the ground anecdotally telling them what to look at. It’s quite difficult to validate that. We want to help them find that right 1% and accelerate that process.”
Harris said the problem becomes more acute as companies scale and then deal with terabytes of data every month.
“We’ve seen it with drones, and recently, cars. They’ve gone from pure hardware to becoming rolling computers that act in the world,” Harris said.
“We believe this pattern is about to accelerate across every vertical. And with this rate of growth, 95% of the robotics companies that will exist in 10 years aren’t here yet.”
Already, the company has pilot partners in oceanic inspections (Hullbot), defence AI (Breaker), maritime automation (Greenroom Robotics) and agriculture (Carbon Robotics).
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Alloy’s platform allows engineers to engage in natural language. Questions like “show me voltage spikes in rough seas” can get answered in minutes instead of days. The platform automatically detects patterns and highlights the relevant footage, sensor readings, and logs so that skilled human operators are freed up to solve more complex problems.
Harris argues that it also democratises robotics for smaller companies lacking the resources of Amazon or Tesla to solve automation problems.
“Every transformative industry needs its foundational infrastructure moment,” he said.
“For the internet, it was AWS, for AI, it was GPU clouds. For robotics, it’s a unified data infrastructure. We’re building the layer that lets thousands of robotics companies move from programming robots to learning from experience.”
“When I graduated as an electrical engineer, there were no real roles for hardware in Australia, other than working at the railway. Now we’re building the infrastructure for an entirely new industry. We are already supporting some of the most advanced robotics companies in Australia, and beginning our expansion into the US.”
Blackbird partner Tom Humphrey said every robotics company will need Alloy’s solution.
“We backed Alloy because they’re solving a universal problem that only gets bigger as robotics scales and automation techniques advance,” he said.
This article was first published by Startup Daily.
