Willow Garage vets score $3M for new industrial robotics venture, Fetch Robotics

Fetch Robotics, a Silicon Valley startup that will be developing robots for the industrial and logistics markets, said today it has raised a $3 million Series A round.

The San Jose, California company has big-time robotics DNA. Its CEO is Melonee Wise, previously the CEO of Unbounded Robotics, and before that one of the earliest employees of Willow Garage. Those two companies — Unbounded was a spin-off of Willow Garage — specialized in making personal robots, including Willow Garage’s famous PR2, one of the first general-purpose robots.

Unbounded had developed the $35,000 UBR-1, which it hoped to sell to elderly people and others needing help with small, repetitive tasks around the house. So it’s an interesting shift for Wise to change her focus from robots aimed at individuals to those marketed to industry. However, Fetch also plans on pursuing other “human-robot collaboration opportunities.”

Fetch said that its investors include O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Shasta Ventures. The company plans to begin selling its robots, which will run on the open-source Robot Operating System, or ROS, during the second quarter.

Unbounded shut down unexpectedly last year, most likely because of problems with the spin-off agreement it had made with Willow Garage.