Zürich, Switzerland: Cleantech venture capital pioneer Emerald Technology Ventures has invested into TinyMobileRobots (TMR), a maker of autonomous field and road marking robots. The EUR 13M funding round, which was joined by STIHL Ventures and others will help the company expand its product line and presence in the fast-growing market for line-marking systems.
Denmark-based TMR makes satellite-guided autonomous vehicles that can apply paint to various surfaces with high precision. This is especially useful in marking athletic venues and roads and other surfaces preparing for construction. These two applications—sports fields and surveying—comprise TMRs’ primary customer base, with both poised for rapid growth in the years ahead as ongoing labor shortages compel managers to adopt automation.
Importantly, TMRs’ robots can operate at high precision without a base station, which typically serve as conduits for GPS signals in conventional robots. This allows TMR to save cost and offer a cheaper, nimbler solution than leading alternatives. TMR pairs its robots with a rugged tablet computer running an intuitive, user-friendly control app, with cloud data storage and analytics.
“In the US, there are 25,000 colleges, all lacking staff for marking their sports fields. And in Western Europe, there are over 100,000 sports clubs, which also have trouble finding volunteers. Many places, the few remaining volunteers are so overworked that they see the robot as their only option to be able to continue the sports activities. Our robots solve that problem,” says Jens Peder Kristensen, CEO & Founder of TMR.
