Insider Brief
- France’s Bleu Robotics has raised €5 million in pre-seed funding to develop AI software designed for teaching humanoid robots new factory tasks with fewer demonstrations and reducing deployment time.
- Contrarian Ventures and OVNI Capital co-led the round, with participation from Kvanted, WEPA and Charlie Songhurst, alongside angel investor Lukas M. Ziegler.
- Bleu said its software can teach tasks from as few as 10 demonstrations, works across different humanoid platforms and is already being deployed with automotive manufacturers and WEPA.
France’s Bleu Robotics has raised €5 million in pre-seed funding to develop AI software designed to teach humanoid robots new factory tasks with fewer demonstrations and shorten the time required to put them to work.
Contrarian Ventures and OVNI Capital co-led the round, with participation from Kvanted, WEPA and technology investor Charlie Songhurst, according to a joint LinkedIn announcement with angel investor Lukas M. Ziegler.
The Paris-based startup is developing software for industrial humanoid robots that learns from demonstrations performed by human operators. Rather than training a robot on large datasets for each task, Bleu said its system identifies the intended goal and constraints behind an operator’s demonstration and uses that information to reproduce the task.
Bleu is working to make a full humanoid deployment process take less than one hour. The company noted a robot can learn a new industrial task from as few as 10 demonstrations, with operators teaching it directly at the workstation without writing code. This will let manufacturers adapt robots as production needs change, reducing the training and integration work required for each new task.
Training Robots on the Factory Floor
Bleu said its software is designed to work across different humanoid platforms and allow robots to be retrained as production requirements change or when they are moved to another location.
The company also claimed its approach can deliver more than 99% accuracy for production tasks and use up to 100 times less data than alternative approaches. Those performance figures were presented in the funding announcement and were not accompanied by testing methodology or benchmark details.
Bleu said its first deployments are already underway with major automotive manufacturers and WEPA, a European hygiene-paper producer. The announcement did not identify the automotive companies.
The company was founded by Benoît Berkoukchi, Jean-Baptiste Mouret and Serena Ivaldi. Berkoukchi previously managed assembly-line teams at Renault, while Mouret and Ivaldi are research directors at France’s INRIA research institute, according to the announcement.