Foxglove brings in $15M, updates 3D panel

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Foxglove’s updated 3D panel includes better rendering for overlapping objects. | Source: Foxglove

Foxglove announced that it brought in $15 million in Series A funding. The company plans to use the funding to continue to improve the Foxglove Platform, an open-source robotics development platform. 

Seth Winterroth led the funding round on behalf of Eclipse Ventures. Winterroth is a partner at Eclipse Ventures who has invested in other robotics companies including 6 River Systems, Wayve, and Forsight Robotics. 

The Series A round also included participation from Foxglove’s existing investor Amplify Partners, and angel investors Kyle Vogt, CEO of Cruise, Daniel Kan, chief product officer at Cruise, Pieter Abbeel, a professor at UC Berkely and director of the Berkely Robot Learning Lab, Randall Kent, co-founder of Cypress.io, Samy Al Bahra, vice president of engineering at Sauce Labs, Jesse Endahl, co-founder of Fleetsmith, and more. 

Foxglove has already been expanding its product and go-to-market teams, and is currently hiring across engineering, growth, sales and more. 

The company also announced this week that it is releasing an updated version of its 3D panel. A beta version of the panel was released in July 2022, which rendered a range of poses, point clouds and other visualization markets to create a picture of what a robot encountered in the real world. 

Updates to the panel include better rendering performance, a more streamlined user experience and support for new messages. The panel now supports new visualization primitives like cubes, spheres and lines and can better render transparent objects so that users can more easily differentiate between stacked objects when navigating complex scenes. 

Foxglove began as a branch of Webviz, a browser-based visualization tool developed at Cruise. The company open-sourced the tool in 2019. Foxglove’s founders, Adrian Macneil and Roman Shtylman, noticed during their time at Cruise how few off-the-shelf tools existed for robotics, and started Foxglove in 2021.

For many robotics companies, all tooling needs to be made in-house, which can be expensive and time-consuming. The company was founded to fill in this gap and create robotics development tools that could help accelerate robotics development.

The company’s second product offering, the Foxglove Data Platform, is a data managing solution for robotics. The product aims to help roboticists better manage the large amounts of data that comes with robotics. 

Foxglove’s founders saw that the industry lacked solutions that could handle the amount of data robotics required. Some roboticists had resorted to simply passing around external hard drives for collaboration. 

Foxglove won a 2022 RBR50 Robotics Innovation Award for the Foxglove Studio and Data Platform.