Artly announces closing an $8M Series Pre-A investment round. The funding round enables further investment into their AI barista technology and brings award-winning artisan coffee to more locations.
Artly is a pioneer brand defining the fourth-wave coffee space. Third-wave coffee focused on quality and small batches; Artly’s technology makes specialty coffee more accessible and affordable. Artly uses robotics, computer vision, and deep learning combined with the skills of master baristas to produce the perfect cup of coffee every time. The company opened its first location in May 2021 in Portland, Oregon. Since then, they have opened three more California Bay Area locations. More recently, they opened the first location in its hometown, Seattle, Washington, near Pike Place Market. They are ready to expand to more locations in the US later this year.
“At Artly, we are developing a robotic platform to preserve and democratize the craftsmanship of creatives in the food and beverage industry. With the help of advanced AI technologies such as imitation learning and vision-language generative models, our robots can now adapt to new environments and carry out complex and ambiguous tasks. A much wider audience can now enjoy the creation of a skilled barista, losslessly, just as what recorders and speakers are to a singer or printers to a writer or painter,” says Meng Wang, CEO of Artly.
“Our AI technology, relentless focus on quality and service, and successful business model will allow Artly to thrive post-pandemic. The future in which AI and our daily lives are intertwined in a great cup of coffee, and I’m excited to bring Artly and our family of coffee ambassadors to all 50 states and beyond,” says Daniel Lee, a Starbucks veteran and now VP of Artly.
Coffee is a $50.7 billion-a-year industry in the US alone, and one way that Artly is successfully differentiating from the competition is its mastery of the craft of coffee. Artly robot baristas learn fast, and its award-winning Human, Master barista Joe Yang, uses their proprietary imitation learning platform to teach the robots new tricks. Each robot barista uses deep learning-based computer vision algorithms to monitor drink quality and guide the arm at each step, ensuring a perfect cup with every order.
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