Yahoo Finance Company making human-piloted giant robots gets $2.4 million in funding
It appears as though U.S. startup MegaBots’ vision for "Pacific Rim"-style competitions is coming closer to reality.
The Oakland, Calif., company confirmed to Yahoo Finance Canada on Tuesday that it has received $2.4 million in seed funding.
The company hopes to bring giant, fighting machines from the big and small screens into real life by pitting them against each other in gladiator-style combat, where the last robot standing wins.
“We're incredibly excited to now be a venture-backed company and working with a world-class team of investors and partners,” Brinkley Warren, the company’s cofounder said in an email.
“Our investors are expecting us to build the sports league of the future, and our fans are expecting us to build the sports league of the future. So now we're going get to work making it happen.”
MegaBots was started by Warren, Matt Oehriein and Gui Cavalcanti in 2014.
The company had previously raised more than $500,000 on Kickstarter for upgrades to its 15-foot, 12,000-pound Mark II weaponized mech.
[Now that America's MegaBots and Japan's Suidobashi Heavy Industries have both built giant, pilot-controlled robots, it seems obvious what has to happen next. / CNET]
The behemoth — which looks to be part Transformer, part piloted Gundam — is armed with a missile launcher that is capable of hurling three-pound cannon balls at speeds of nearly 200 kilometres per hour. It was completed in the summer of 2015.
After the completion of the Mark II, MegaBots laid down a giant, armoured gauntlet for rival piloted-robot maker Suidobashi Heavy Industries.
The Tokyo-based company – which has its own 13-foot, 9,000 pound Kuratas – accepted the challenge under the condition that the battle features melee combat.
An exact date and location of the robot rumble has yet to be determined.
Those involved in the latest round of investing include:
Azure Capital
Autodesk
AME Cloud Ventures, which is an early stage fund of Jerry Yang, who is the cofounder and former CEO of Yahoo
Enspire Capital
Ruvento
Tokyo Founder’s Fund
Individual angel investors also include: former chair of the National Venture Capital Association Ray Rothrock, Twitch COO Kevin Lin, Ash Patel, Kunihiro Ishiguro and Yoshinari Yoshikawa.
