Demisto, a company founded by four security industry pros, emerged from stealth today with a pretty cool bot-driven security platform and $6 million in Series A. The round was led by Accel with participation from Cylance CEO Stuart McClure, Lookout CTO Kevin Mahaffey and Bluecoat President Mike Fey, all security industry veterans.
It's not just a case of creating cool bots, though – as Festo's Henry Frontzek explains the tech used to create the robots is proving useful in finding ways to improve energy efficiency and communication in more regular products.
Startups Postmates and DoorDash will begin using rolling cooler bots that drive themselves on sidewalks to deliver stuff in Redwood City and Washington, D.C.
The robots will serve you now: Greenwich, London residents have officially begun receiving deliveries from autonomous, six-wheeled rolling cooler bots, which are handling the "last mile" of food delivery from nearby takeout restaurants.
He's Swiss, so that makes some sense, but all national rivalries aside he's made a pretty cool little bot.
For now I guess we should congratulate Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos and his team at the University of Minnesota for creating a pretty cool little bot.
The trouble with bots is they are limited by their programmed actions, says Mikhail Naumov, chief strategy officer at DigitalGenius. "While chat bots are cool and are getting lots of attention today — they often break once the user asks for something that has not been pre-programmed into the bot.
The general idea is at some point, by the time people clue in it might be a bot, things have cooled off and the person has moved on".
But it wouldn't be the only explanation for a cool down, of course, as the "bot ban" was enacted in February 2012 – meaning that last Christmas was already in the post-bot timeframe.
Investors this week have been chattering about what they've deemed to be proof that Mark Zuckerberg is some sunglasses-wearing, too-cool-for-the-corpo-bots, uppity youngster during Facebook's pre-IPO roadshow.
