Robotics companies often have to deal with a simple but confounding problem: Robotsproduce a lot of data. Even a simple robotcan easilyproduce up to a terabyte of data per day,since they continuously capture data from cameras and sensors.
Sydney, Australia-basedAlloythinks it can help with that issue: The startupisbuilding datainfrastructurefor robotics companies to help them process and organizeall the data their robots collect fromvarious sources, including sensors andcameras.
At its core, Alloyencodes and labelsthe data it collects,andallows users to search through their data using natural language to find bugs and errors.Users can alsoset up rules to catchand flagissues in the future, similar tohow observability tools flag errors in software code.
“The current pattern is, you look for some kind of anomaly, and then you’ll replay the data,” Joe Harris, the founder and CEO of Alloy,told TechCrunch. “They then are spending hours scrubbing through this data, looking for these issues that have been flagged to them, trying to diagnose from that [while] not really having a good view as to whether this has happened before, if it’sa high-severity issue or this one-off,edge case.”
Considering how much dataa single robot produces, as robotics companies look to scale,this data problem will continue to compound, Harris added.
Harrishas beenfascinated byroboticssince he was a kid.But when he graduated from collegein 2018, there weren’tmany opportunities to work in the field, sohe instead worked multiple roles acrossAustraliantech companies, including Atlassian andtelehealth startupEucalyptus.
In 2024,he decidedthe time was rightto launch a robotics company of his own. Heoriginally thought he’d focus onbuilding robots for the agriculture industrydue toaninterestinvertical farming, but when he started talking to other founders,the issue of managing the data robots produce kept coming up.Hefigured he might as well solve thatproblemfirst.
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“If I need to solve this problem for myself and my robotics company, I will have a great horizontal solution,” Harris said. “Perhaps thatwould be a more importantnear-termmission — to help enable other robotics companies to spend less time on data plumbing and more time on getting to that high reliability.”
Since its launch inFebruary 2025,Alloy has signed fourAustralianrobotics companies asdesign partnersand looks to push into the U.S. market this year.
“The customers that we found have been most excited about this because they’ve gone through the pain of building and maintaining it themselves,” Harris said. “They’d much rather have a fantastic tool, like a Databricks just specifically built for robotics.”
Alloy has also raised a little more than AUD $4.5 million(about $3 million)ina pre-seed round that was led by Blackbird Ventures, with participation fromAirtreeVentures, Xtal Ventures, and Skip Capital, in addition to angel investors from robotics companies.
The companydoesn’thave too manydirectcompetitors yet. Many robotics companies are either retrofitting existing data management tools thataren’tdesigned for the multimodal data robots produce,or are attempting to build their own internal data management tools.
As commercial use cases for robotics continueto increase, Alloy hopes it will be able to capture a good share of thegrowing market.
“It’s never been a better time to build a robotics company,” Harris said. “I really want to make it possible for the next10,000,100,000 robotics companies thatdon’tyet exist, that inevitably willnot have to necessarily reinvent the wheel, like every company has.”