Teleo adds $16.2M Series A to enhance Supervised Autonomy of heavy machinery

Teleo, a company building autonomous technology for heavy equipment, announced it has raised $16.2 million in Series A extension funds in addition to its previously announced Series A funding round.

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 unlock operator efficiency further; and collecting real-world data to continue training AI models. Since its inception in 2019, Teleo has raised $29.8 million.

Autonomous heavy machinery to increase safety, productivity

Teleo recently announced it received new orders for 34 machines from nine 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.

“There is a strong value proposition of our technology across many industries that leverage heavy machinery and our focus is to fulfill 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 labor shortages and deliver a positive impact.”

Teleo converts any make, model and vintage of heavy equipment, such as bulldozers, wheel loaders, snow plows 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 center 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 labor shortages.

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.