Teleo, a California-based startup that retrofits heavy equipment with autonomous technology, has raised $12 million in Series A funding from F-Prime Capital, K9 Ventures and Trucks Venture Capital.
The startup was founded to address the shortage of skilled labor facing heavy civil and mining contractors.
Teleo’s Supervised Autonomy Technology lets contractors retrofit their existing fleet of heavy equipment for remote operation, allowing dozers, excavators, trucks, wheel loaders and more to be run without an operator in the cab.
The operator can control multiple pieces of equipment from a remote control station, enhancing both safety and productivity, the company says.
With Teleo Supervised Autonomy technology, the remote operator can set a machine into autonomy mode for certain use cases or actions, choosing which machines to control and which to allow to operate autonomously.
Live feeds and advanced analytics enhance contractor insight and improve performance, often providing better visibility and control than is possible for an operator sitting in the cab.
Teleo says this pragmatic “crawl-walk-run” approach delivers the benefits of supervised autonomy now, while allowing construction and mining companies to amortize their investments as the technology matures toward fully autonomous heavy equipment operation.
“Teleo was founded by two exceptional individuals, with extensive backgrounds in deep technology and autonomy. We believe their approach to bringing human supervised autonomy to the heavy equipment market is incredibly insightful and important. Teleo’s technology positively impacts the ROI of operation, while both upskilling the operator community and increasing safety levels," says Adam Grosser, chairman and managing partner of UP.Partners, Teleo's funding leader.
In addition to the funding boost, Teleo announced a partnership with RDO Equipment. The John Deere dealer will sell, service and support Teleo’s Supervised Autonomy technology.
The proprietary technology works across all heavy equipment types and all brands.
Here's a preview of Teleo’s Supervised Autonomy technology in action:
