The company will primarily use the funds to scale customer deployments and continue its expansion in new industries that use heavy machinery, such as wheel loaders, terminal tractors, excavators, and more. Teleo will also use the funds to enhance its AI capabilities, including advancing autonomous features; integrating large language models (LLMs) to further unlock operator efficiency; and collecting real-world data to continue training AI models. Teleo's first extension round, totaling $9.2 million, was led by UP.Partners, with participation from other investors, including new investor Trousdale Ventures and return investor F-Prime Capital, among others. The second extension, totalling $7 million, was also led by UP.Partners, with participation from new investor Triatomic Capital, as well as returning investors F-Prime Capital and Trucks Venture Capital, among others. Since inception in 2019, Teleo has raised $29.8 million.
"Our strong conviction in Teleo's solution comes from the incredible impact their technology for remote and autonomous operations of heavy machinery is having for some of the largest operators in the world. In addition to significant productivity gains, Teleo creates a positive effect on the workforce, where skilled labor shortages are endemic to the industry," said Adam Grosser, Chairman and Managing Partner at UP.Partners. "Teleo's retrofit technology helps to make equipment operator jobs more accessible and safer, in addition to improving customer profitability by reviving machines that were otherwise sitting idle."
Teleo recently announced it received new orders for 34 machines from a total of 9 new customers from new and existing industries. The company secured customers in the pulp and paper; logging; port logistics; munition clearing; and agriculture industries. The company is also targeting expansion into other industries such as airports; waste and recycling; logistics; warehousing; and more.
"Teleo's technology has created a groundswell of support and excitement with its customers, distributors, and across the industries it serves," said Sanjay Aggarwal, Venture Partner, F-Prime Capital. "It's rare to find a technology that delivers on the promise of being truly revolutionary for legacy industries and capable of solving a wide range of challenges, such as labour shortages. Teleo is capturing customers across an array of industries, and the company is positioned well to scale quickly."
Teleo converts any make, model, and vintage of heavy equipment, such as bulldozers, wheel loaders, and excavators, into autonomous and remote-operated robots. The combination of remote and autonomous operations, called Supervised Autonomy, allows one operator to supervise multiple autonomous machines working simultaneously by enabling the operator to remotely perform complex tasks as needed. The operator sits at a central command centre that can be stationed locally or thousands of miles away. There are many industries that use heavy machines to perform repeatable and predictable tasks where Teleo's technology can help, especially amid historic labour shortages. For example, the Associated General Contractors of America estimates that 91% of construction firms are having a hard time finding workers to hire, driving up costs and project delays.
"There is a strong value proposition of our technology across many industries that leverage heavy machinery and our focus is to fulfil and scale our solid pipeline of orders," said Vinay Shet, Co-founder and CEO, Teleo. "There's a wider, untapped range of industries where Teleo Supervised Autonomy can provide instant value. We will use these funds to further deploy and scale our technology so we can continue to address historic labour shortages and deliver a positive impact."
Teleo's global dealer partner network, which was launched in 2023, includes dealer partners in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, North Africa, and the Middle East. The company also demonstrated the world's longest supervised autonomous operation in history, when operators in Dallas controlled machines at a worksite in Finland, over 5,000 miles away.
