Foresight, an independent infrastructure and private equity investment manager, and Williams Advanced Engineering (WAE) are adding a further £1.45 million from Foresight Williams Technology EIS Fund into Inovo Robotics. This investment will allow the Company to grow sales internationally and brings the total invested by the Fund to £2.95 million, having originally invested £1.5 million in October 2018 to support the Company’s first product to market.
“Having the support from the Foresight Williams Technology EIS Fund has allowed us to significantly accelerate the development of the business. Foresight has made an invaluable contribution to the company’s commercial strategy, helping to identify new opportunities and building a solid growth strategy. WAE has a vast range of relevant experience and hundreds of highly skilled experts who continue to assist us with highly specialist technical challenges that arise. Closing this second round of investment is testament to the strong relationship with FWT and a deep shared belief in the scale of the market opportunity,” said Henry Wood, Co-founder, Inovo Robotics.
Inovo was founded in 2016 by Henry Wood and Jonathan Cheung, both former senior engineers at defence technology company, Northrup Grumman. The Company is developing a competitively priced “cobot”, a collaborative robot designed to operate safely within a human work environment and intended to assist people with repetitive tasks. It offers manufacturing and logistics companies that perform batch processes a more cost-effective solution. Rather than having to purchase multiple robots for individual tasks, the modular design means its cobot can be easily adapted to optimise the balance between reach and payload. Moreover, its simple and easy-to-use software allows even a non-specialist user to re-program the cobot quickly for a new task.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the cobot market was growing rapidly. Social distancing directives will likely dominate the workplace for the foreseeable future and automation will play an increasingly important role in the post-pandemic workplace. Inovo, with its adaptable cobot, is well-placed to help companies begin to recover, performing manual tasks typically undertaken by humans, resulting in fewer human interactions and safe working conditions for employees in the post-COVID-19 workplace.
