Teleo was founded with the mission to revolutionize how we build the world. Our goal is to improve the productivity and safety of heavy equipment operations through autonomous technology.
Today, we are thrilled to announce that Teleo has raised a $12M Series A investment to help make that vision a reality. Our Series A is led by UP.Partners, with new investors F-Prime Capital and K9 Ventures joining the round. We’re grateful Trucks Venture Capital, who led Teleo’s seed round, has participated again. We’re also thrilled to announce that Adam Grosser, Chairman and Managing Partner at UP.Partners, has joined our Board of Directors. We’ve assembled a terrific group of investors and we’re excited about how they can help Teleo transform the construction and mining industries.
“Teleo was founded by two exceptional individuals, with extensive backgrounds in deep technology and autonomy. We believe their approach to bringing human supervised autonomy to the heavy equipment market is incredibly insightful and important. Teleo’s technology positively impacts the ROI of operation, while both upskilling the operator community, and increasing safety levels.”
— Adam Grosser, Chairman and Managing Partner of UP.Partners
Teleo’s novel solution to the shortage of skilled operators
The biggest challenge facing heavy civil and mining contractors today is shortage of skilled labor. Finding and retaining operators to run heavy equipment, like dozers, excavators, trucks, wheel loaders, and more, is increasingly difficult.
To address this problem, Teleo is developing autonomous technology that retrofits contractors’ existing heavy equipment and turns the machines into semi-autonomous robots. Teleo lets construction and mining contractors run their heavy equipment without an operator in the cabin. Instead, Teleo Supervised Autonomy technology enables the operator to control multiple pieces of equipment while sitting at a remote control station — which significantly enhances both safety and productivity.
Today, contractors use a mixed fleet of heavy equipment from a variety of OEMs, including Caterpillar, John Deere, Komatsu, and others. Teleo has developed proprietary technology that works across all heavy equipment types and all brands. With Teleo Supervised Autonomy technology, the remote operator can set a machine into autonomy mode for certain use cases or actions, choosing which machines to control and which to allow to operate autonomously. Teleo’s technology also offers live feeds and advanced analytics to enhance contractor insight and improve performance, often providing better visibility and control than is possible for an operator sitting in the cab. Here’s an extended video of the Teleo system moving several hundreds of tons of dirt per hour on a contractor site.
Real-world impact
We believe the latest advancements in engineering should be leveraged to improve people’s lives in the near term. It’s why we’re building toward autonomy incrementally, and why we’re offering Teleo products through heavy equipment distributors.
We’re proud to partner with RDO Equipment Co. (RDO) to offer Teleo Supervised Autonomy technology to contractors in their relevant market area. RDO is a construction equipment and technology supplier and one of John Deere’s largest dealerships. Contractors across the United States rely on the service and support provided by RDO to meet their heavy equipment and technology needs. Partnering with RDO will let Teleo scale the deployment of our systems while offering customers superior service and support. Teleo supplies OEM-agnostic technology to RDO, and they ensure successful integration, support operator training, and maximize uptime for contractors.
Looking to the future
Teleo is well funded, in market, and growing fast. Our team has expertise in building autonomous vehicles, construction and mining, and developing foundational technologies, and come from companies like Tesla, Google, Zoox, Lyft, Archer, Amazon, and BAE systems. We’re intimately familiar with the industry challenges, because our team members have been working in the industry for decades. And we know how to build technology that can address these challenges, because our team members have already built it for adjacent applications. It’s with this combination of experience that we’re working toward our mission. We look forward to a future where heavy equipment operations is safe, effective, and provides a comfortable, fun environment for operators to work in.
To set up a meeting with our team, please contact us. For information about open roles at Teleo, see our careers page. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter to stay up-to-date on our development.