Cinema goers who recall the film Robocop can be forgiven for feeling a little nervous about the Swiss start-up Ascento Robotics, which is today announcing the completion of a $4.3 million seed funding round. However, founders Alessandro Morra, Miguel de la Iglesia Valls, Ciro Salzmann and Dominik Mannhart insist their robots have the potential to transform the security industry for the better.
Unlike the ultra-violent Robocop, Ascento’s robots operate as peaceful patrollers – the eyes and ears of a human security team that can jump into action as they are alerted to a potential threat.
The machines are designed to navigate outdoor terrains in all weathers, with Ascento targeting owners and operators of facilities such as large warehouses, industrial manufacturing plants and pharmaceutical sites. The robots are programmed to patrol these sites, reporting back to the security team if they discover an intruder or simply find a problem such as a door that’s been left open.
Ascento CEO Morra says that while the founders’ backgrounds are all in robotics, the inspiration for the business came from their personal experiences working in the security sector as students. “I saw how hard and repetitive this work can be,” Morra says. “You’re out in the rain and the cold doing the same thing over and again; it’s exactly the sort of thing where autonomous technology is needed.”
All the more so given that security companies are struggling to recruit human beings to do this work. Data from Gitnux suggests that worldwide, the industry has fewer than half the people it needs. Recruitment and retention is a perennial problem with many security companies reporting sky-high staff turnover rates.
Replacing parts of the security role with robots therefore makes sense. Ascento’s machines can move at walking speed and self-charge so that they don’t run out of battery at a critical moment. They’re also equipped with cameras, so they can feed back video to a security team in the control room; the team can even communicate through the robot – to ask someone the robot has encountered to provide identification details, for example.
“It’s a natural evolution,” says Morra. “Security teams started out depending entirely on human patrols, but CCTV made it possible to monitor fixed locations continuously; our robots bring those two ideas together.”
The technology started out as a student project at the Autonomous System Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, with Ascento launching in 2022. Since then, it has grown quickly, signing up a number of customers in its home market. Robots deployed in the field have racked up more than 3,000 kilometres of patrols so far this year.
The company sees leasing as the right business model, so that customers don’t have to incur significant upfront costs. Ascento charges for each model by the hour, with its rates worked out according to the cost of hiring human guards in the location the customer wants to protect. “The running costs of operating our robots can be close to half of human guards, though this depends on the contract details of the deployment,” explains Morra.
Having proved its technology works and reached the commercialisation stage, Ascento’s challenge now is to scale the business. Hence today’s seed round, led by Wingman Ventures and Playfair, with participation from a number of angel investors. These individual backers include Tim Kentley-Klay, the founder of Zoox, bought by Amazon, robotics industry veteran Ryan Gariepy, Daniel Kottlarz, founder of MYBOTSHOP, and Tobias Redlin, founder of IGO3D.
Pascal Mathis, a founding partner at Wingman, says the investor worked with the the founder team for more than a year before becoming an investor. “We look forward to making the life of security guards easier and the objects they protect safer,” he says.
At Playfair, managing partner Chris Smith adds: “Many of the world’s most pressing business challenges cannot be solved by software alone – we see the next decade as providing a huge opportunity for companies building in robotics to solve these challenges.”
The $4.5 million raised will support Ascento as it builds up its fleet and invests in sales and marketing capacity. “We think technology can make a huge difference to the security industry, but there’s so much work to do,” adds Morra.
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