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Teleo creates retrofit kits for heavy equipment that allows the equipment to operate semi-autonomously. | Source: Teleo

Teleo, a company that creates semi-autonomous retrofit kits for heavy construction and mining equipment, announced it raised $12 million in Series A funding. The company plans to use the funds from the round to scale the deployment of, and invest in research and development for, its Teleo Supervised Autonomy technology.

The company’s autonomy kits can be fitted onto heavy equipment to allow it to run without an operator in the cabin. Teleo’s Supervised Autonomy allows an operator to control multiple pieces of equipment form a remote control station. 

“With this Series A funding, we plan to double down on hardening and deploying technology that lets our customers operate their existing fleets of heavy equipment semi-autonomously,” Vinay Shet, co-founder and CEO of Teleo, said.

UP.Partners, a firm that invests in technology that helps transport people and goods faster, safer and cleaner, led the funding round. New investors, F-Prime Capital and K9 Ventures, also participated in the round, as well as Trucks Venture Capital, which led Teleo’s seed funding round.

“Teleo was founded by two exceptional individuals, with extensive backgrounds in deep technology and autonomy. We believe their approach to bringing human supervised autonomy to the heavy equipment market is incredibly insightful and important. Teleo’s technology positively impacts the ROI of operation, while both upskilling the operator community, and increasing safety levels,” Adam Grosser, chairman and managing partner of UP.Partners, said.

Along with the funding, Teleo announced a partnership with RDO Equipment Co., a construction equipment technology supplier and one of John Deere’s largest dealerships. According to the company, partnering with heavy equipment distributors like RDO will allow it to reach customers across multiple distribution channels. 

Teleo was founded in 2019 by Shet and Rom Clement, the company’s current CTO. Shet and Clement both worked at Lyft prior to founding Teleo, Shet as the company’s Director of Product Management and Clement as the Head of Hardware Engineering.