Tutor Intelligence, a robotics company based in Watertown, Massachusetts, said on 2 November 2026 that it had raised $75m in a Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The round takes the total the company has raised to $117m, according to a statement from the company.
Union Square Ventures, which led Tutor Intelligence’s $34m Series A in December 2025, and Neo, which backed its seed round, also took part. The company did not disclose its valuation, and it has not published revenue figures or the number of robots it currently operates.
In a post announcing the investment, Andreessen Horowitz partners Raghu Raghuram, Martin Casado and Jamie Sullivan described Tutor as a robotics research and deployment company and said its pricing model opens up automation to small and mid-sized businesses that have previously faced high upfront costs.
What the money is for
Tutor Intelligence said the new capital will be used to train its robot foundation models and to manufacture and deploy its two robots, Cassie and Sonny. The company said it expects to have more than 1,000 robots under contract by the end of 2027, all built and deployed in the US.
The company reported that its robots are now working in almost four times as many facilities as a year ago, and that nearly a third of the organisations that received Tutor robots in the past 12 months were existing customers adding more units. It did not name any customers, saying only that its robots operate in some of the largest manufacturing and logistics networks in the US, handling consumer goods such as cereals, snacks, sweets, cosmetics, home goods and toys.
“We can hardly build robots fast enough,” said Josh Gruenstein, co-founder and chief executive of Tutor Intelligence, in the company’s statement.
Robots sold by the hour
Tutor Intelligence was founded in 2021 by Gruenstein and Alon Kosowsky-Sachs, its chief technology officer, and grew out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Andreessen Horowitz said the pair met as undergraduates at MIT.
Rather than selling machines up front, the company charges for robot work by the hour or by the pick. Its website lists pricing from $14 an hour, with support, maintenance and model updates included and month-to-month terms. Customers can also buy the robots outright with an annual service plan. The company handles deployment and pushes software and model upgrades to robots already in the field.
Cassie is a single-armed mobile robot for case picking, palletising and depalletising. Sonny is a two-armed mobile robot whose first job is e-commerce order fulfilment, picking items from racking and taking them to packing stations. Both run on the same model.
The robots learn partly through remote human operators, which the company calls “tutors”, who guide them through tasks; each completed task becomes training data. In May 2026 the company unveiled what it calls Data Factory 1 in a former mill building in Watertown that also serves as its headquarters. The Robot Report reported that the site houses 100 Sonny robots supervised by 45 to 50 remote tutors in Mexico and the Philippines, alongside on-site staff.
Market context and what to watch
Demand for automation in the US has picked up. According to the International Federation of Robotics, 38,400 industrial robots were installed in the US in 2025, up 12% on the previous year, making it the world’s second-largest market behind China. The federation said installations in the food and beverage industry rose 30% to 2,900 units, and named warehousing and logistics among the sources of growth.
Tutor Intelligence competes for investor money and customers with a growing number of well-funded robotics developers. Its approach depends on putting robots to paid work early and improving them as they run.
The main test now is whether the company can scale manufacturing quickly enough to reach its target of more than 1,000 robots under contract by the end of 2027, and whether its hourly pricing holds up as it moves from repeat orders at existing sites to larger fleets across new customers. The company has not said when it will disclose fleet size or name its larger customers.
