Foxglove just closed $40 million in Series B funding to build the data platform that makes all of it possible.
The San Francisco startup raised the round from Bessemer Venture Partners, with Eclipse and Amplify Partners joining. The funding brings Foxglove's total raised to $58 million since launching in 2021. Not bad for a company building developer tools that most people never see.
Foxglove builds data infrastructure for robotics companies. The platform handles multimodal sensor data (lidar, cameras, telemetry, logs) that robots generate at scale. Think petabytes of data that need to be visualized, debugged, and managed across development cycles. Co-founders Adrian Macneil and Roman Shtylman saw the problem firsthand at Cruise. Large autonomous vehicle companies employ hundreds of engineers just to build internal tooling. Smaller companies can't afford that overhead.
The business model is working. Customers include Amazon, Anduril, Chef Robotics, Dexterity, NVIDIA, Shield AI, and multiple autonomous vehicle and humanoid robot companies. Dexterity reported 20 percent savings in development time and $150,000 annually in reduced tooling costs after integrating the platform. Shield AI embedded Foxglove directly into its HiveMind autonomy stack, making it part of the SDK that Shield's own customers use.
The customer list reveals something interesting. Foxglove serves companies across warehouse robots, defense systems, agricultural automation, and self-driving vehicles. This horizontal approach creates resilience. When one robotics category faces funding challenges, others keep growing.
Macneil compared the moment to early cloud computing. In the 2000s, Google, Amazon, and Facebook built their own infrastructure. Then AWS, Datadog, and Twilio turned that internal tooling into platforms anyone could use. Foxglove is betting the same pattern plays out in robotics.
Design lesson: Infrastructure companies can be more defensible than application companies. While individual robot categories face cycles, the underlying data platform serves all of them.
The funding comes at a challenging time for robotics fundraising. Many hardware-focused robotics companies are struggling to raise capital in 2024 and 2025. Foxglove's software infrastructure play attracted investors despite the broader headwinds. The company plans to expand its 50-person team (half engineers) and accelerate product development.
One question remains unanswered. Can a single data platform truly serve robots operating in warehouses, underwater, in the air, and in space? The use cases differ dramatically. Warehouse robots need millisecond response times. Underwater robots face connectivity constraints. Defense systems require air-gapped deployments. Foxglove's bet is that the core data management challenges are similar enough to support with one platform. Time will tell if that thesis holds as customers scale from prototypes to millions of deployed robots.
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