investment

Inspired by the succesful Invest in Odense events in Denmark the Danish representatives of Odense participated in the FundingBox Start-up Arena at Automatica in Munich, where new connections were made between investors and robot companies. Rocking Robots discussed this event with Martyna Waliszewska, Investment Manager at Invest in Odense.

Agility Robotics, manufacturer of robots designed to work alongside people in logistics and warehouse environments, has raised $150 million. This capital will be used to accelerate Agility’s R&D and scale its robot production.

In November and December 2021, Gartner surveyed 1,120 manager-level or higher respondents in organisations with at least $1 million in annual revenue in North America, Western Europe and Asia/Pacific to understand how organisations approach large-scale buying efforts for enterprise technology.

Fifty-three per cent of organisations report their board of directors are among the main decision makers for emerging technology (ET) investments, just behind chief information officers (CIOs) and chief technology officers (CTOs), according to a recent Gartner survey.

Chipmaker Nvidia is investing $10 million Serve Robotics, an Uber spin off. The last mile delivery-startup will use this to expand its sidewalk delivery robot service outside of the current locations where it operates, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The hit rate is high when capital-hungry start-ups and risk-taking investors meet up at Odense Investor Summit in Europe’s fastest growing robotics environment. Based on the success of previous summits, more than half of attending start-ups will succeed in finding investor capital at the matchmaking event. This year 15 technology companies will present their automation inventions in front of 300 investors.

German industrial group STIHL, manufacturer of chainsaw power tools, forestry machinery and robotic lawn mowers, announced a significant investment in the Danish robotics company, TinyMobileRobots. STIHL’s robotic lawn mowers share a strong technical kinship with the advanced and fully autonomous line marking robots produced by TinyMobileRobots, which are intended for use in sports fields, road construction, agriculture and more.

IT spending in EMEA is forecast to total $1.3 trillion in 2022, an increase of 4.7% from 2021, according to the latest forecast by Gartner. The 2022 growth rate will be slower than in 2021 when EMEA IT spending is expected to grow 6.3%.

Organisations must embrace business composability to thrive through disruption in 2022 and beyond, according to Gartner’s annual global survey of CIOs and technology executives. EMEA CIO respondents projected a 3.7% IT budget increase for 2022, on average, which is slightly higher than the average global IT budget growth (3.6%)

One-third of technology and service provider organisations with artificial intelligence (AI) technology plans said they would invest $1 million or more into these technologies in the next two years, according to a new survey from Gartner. Most survey respondents (87%) with AI technologies as a major investment area believe industrywide funding for AI will increase at a moderate to fast pace through 2022.