Grishin Robotics, an international venture fund with Russian roots, was among the investors in Ring, a global manufacturer of home security products which has just been acquired by Amazon at a $1 billion valuation.
The Ring devices, which provide “smart security at every corner,” can integrate with Amazon’s voice-controlled assistant Alexa — and there’s a potential for much more, the media have reported.
In March 2016, Grishin Robotics injected $61.2 million in Ring. According to Crunchbase, since its inception in 2012 the company had raised $209 million in total from a variety investors including DFJ, Qualcomm, Goldman Sachs and Kleiner Perkins, and the UK-based fund Virgin Group, among others.
The deal, one of Amazon’s biggest acquisitions to date, has also been one of the major deals in the emerging robotics market for the past several years, said Dmitry Grishin, the former Mail.Ru Group CEO who founded Grishin Robotics in 2012.
“We stood at the origins of the industry and now we see it becoming bigger and more up-to-date. The industry is still at its early stage of development, though” he said, expecting the next coming years to be “no less interesting.”
“The deal [with Amazon] will become a major milestone [for the industry] — Amazon’s interest in the sector will attract other players,” Grishin Grishin explained in this exchange with the Russian online business publication RBC.
Grishin Robotics initially focused exclusively on robotics, then started showing interest in such areas as collaborative and material handling robots, AI and data analytics, industrial IoT and other hardware or software innovation.
Sources: RBC, Reuters, CrunchBase, Ring
