Kyle Vogt, the former founder and CEO of self-driving car company Cruise, has a new VC-backed robotics startup focused on housework.
Vogt announced Monday that the new startup, called Bot Company, has raised $150 million from former GitHub CEO and investor Nat Friedman, Pioneer founder and investor Daniel Gross, Spark Capital general partner Nabeel Hyatt, its CEO Stripe Patrick Collison, Stripe co-founder John Collison and Quiet Capital.
Vogt founded the startup with Paril Jain, who led the AI technology team at Tesla, and former Cruise software engineer Luke Holoubek.
“We create bots that do jobs so you don’t have to. Everyone is busy. Robots can help,” Vogt wrote social media X. “So many things are competing for our time – commuting, longer working hours and the complexity of modern life. Our team has spent years creating robots (including the self-driving kind) that give people some of that time back, and we’re taking it a step further with this company.”
Vogt did not respond to a request for comment.
The new effort comes five months after Vogt stepped down as CEO of Cruise, the autonomous vehicle startup he founded in 2013 and was later acquired by General Motors. His resignation followed an Oct. 2 incident that saw a Cruise vehicle swerve and drag a pedestrian 20 feet after the pedestrian was hit by a human-driven car. That, combined with the company’s response, prompted California regulators to suspend Cruise’s installation and driverless testing permits, effectively ending robotaxi operations in the state where most of its operations were located.
Since his resignation, Vogt has kept a relatively low public profile. His return, however, should come as no surprise to those who have followed his career. Before Cruise, Vogt founded Justin.tv, a website that allowed anyone to stream videos online. it later morphed into Twitch, a live streaming platform that was acquired by Amazon in 2014 for $970 million. He also founded Socialcam, which was acquired by Autodesk for $60 million in 2012.
