Italian startup Cyberwave has raised €7m in funding from United Ventures, The TechShop, Vento and Pi Campus less than one week after incorporating to build the “Hugging Face of robotics”.
Cyberwave, based in Milan, is the brainchild of serial founder Simone Di Somma, who took his last company AskData through Y Combinator before exiting to SAP, and ex-Google product manager Vittorio Banfi, who exited his previous company Botsociety.
The two cofounders have built a marketplace made up of 3D digital twins of robots, sensors and machines that allows developers to download and create a twin of a product, test it in a simulated environment and then deploy the same behaviour to real hardware.
That’s currently a headache, CEO Di Somma tells Sifted, because every robot, sensor and actuator comes with bespoke specifications and APIs making automation across a factory rigid and expensive.
“If you want to integrate those robots with drones, for example, you need to invest in multiple tech stacks,” he says. “If you want to combine sensors and cameras and drones there are limitations there.”
With Cyberwave, “you can combine multiple products into one system.”
Customers can plug Cyberwave’s tech into existing robotics software infrastructure such as ROS/ROS2, Nvidia Isaac or Nvidia Omniverse to bring existing robots and simulations from multiple vendors into one place.
There’s a library of 50 items in the catalogue already, Di Somma says, including products from Swiss quadruped maker ANYbotics and US robotics company Boston Dynamics. The rest of the catalogue is made up of a collection of drones, industrial arms and sensors.
The long-term goal, Di Somma says, is to open up the platform to third party skills so that as customers develop new use cases for robotics systems the wider Cyberwave customer base can benefit.
“The plan is to be a community where we can connect developers with new startups in the robotics space,” Di Somma says.
Potential use cases include defect rework on automated assembly lines, logistics packing optimisation, drone inspections, construction site monitoring and computer-vision systems that upgrade cameras into smart sensors.
Cyberwave is currently working on early commercial pilots with European manufacturers in automotive, construction and logistics, but can’t disclose which ones. The company will adopt a classic SaaS model for its enterprise customers, Di Somma says, which will see them charged a monthly or yearly subscription fee.
Di Somma is working directly on integration with the pilot customers to help test the tech and see where it might need to be improved. Over time he says this will change and the community will be able to do the integrations themselves.
Cyberwave will use its funding to grow its headcount across its Milan, Zurich and San Francisco offices and expand to the US after initially focusing on Europe’s manufacturing giants.
Di Somma tells Sifted the company is also bringing on an additional cofounder, who’s been chosen but not announced yet.
