Trifo Puls In $15M Series B

Trifo, dedicated to helping people achieve a better balance of family, work and personal life, today announced Lucy, a smart home superhero, outfitted with an AI-powered brain that enables the robot to protect its home with advanced surveillance technology and also clean the home with one of the most powerful vacuums available. Trifo also announced Series B funding of $15 million, raising total funding of $26 million to date.

"Revenue for smart home products globally will grow to $28.4 billion in 2020, up 54% from $18.5 billion in 2018, and the feature set of these devices continues to improve," said Zhe Zhang, Trifo's Founder and CEO. "Lucy reflects the evolution of our products from robot vacuums to AIoT-enabled home robots that can assist with a wide range of features that help people with their life and work."

In a recent survey of more than 500 consumers, Clutch found that smart home appliances are the connected devices people own and use the most. Two-thirds of people (67%) own a smart home appliance and 49% use smart home appliances the most compared to other connected devices.

Here's Why You'll Love Lucy

Lucy is the Trifo family's superhero big sister, complementing her robot brother Max, with many exciting features:

Two Cameras Are Better than One – Lucy offers both day and night surveillance via a 1080P HDR color camera and a second active depth sensor that provides night vision. With this unique combination, Lucy utilizes RGB and depth information like no other home robot for high precision position tracking, indoor mapping and super intelligent self-decision-making. It also provides unique day and night surveillance functionality on a mobile platform.

Room-by-Room Cleaning – Lucy is the first smart home robot to recognize and divide rooms automatically. With an advanced 6-core ARM SoC, Lucy pushes the limit of accurate and efficient inference and brings edge AI to reality. In one example, if she sees a bed in a room, she will understand and label it a bedroom. Her family can designate cleaning areas through the Trifo Home App. Lucy is also Alexa-enabled and follows instructions to clean or not clean zones with "no-go" lines.

Obstacle Avoidance (Including Pet Doo-Doo) – Most home robots cannot recognize obstacles less than 4" tall, but Lucy sees it all, down to 1", so slippers, socks and pet accidents are visible, and Lucy avoids them. Lucy provides an advanced real-time object detection with a complicated combination of proprietary 3D geometry and 3D semantics algorithms.

Lucy or Family-Defined Patrol Routes – Superheroes serve and protect! Through the Trifo Home App, Lucy's family can define patrol routes among the auto-recognized rooms inside the home. Users can pin specific locations and Lucy can define optimized patrol routes and explore autonomously. Lucy is the only home robot that can understand and recognize her furry family members, alerting the family of their goings-on while away or asleep-you'll know who's been in the cookie jar!

And more� Lucy's 3,000 Pa suction allows her to effectively clean up dirt and her 5,200 mAh battery keeps powered up to 120 minutes.
For a complete set of features, please visit here.

Trifo Raises $26 Million in Total Funding

Trifo has also raised $15 million in a Series B round of funding bringing the total raise to $26 million. Series B investors include Yidu Cloud, Tsinghua AI Fund and Matrix Partners. The Series B raise will fund support for continued hardware and software development on future Trifo AI home robots, U.S. and European market expansion, and talent acquisition.

"Trifo has quickly developed highly advanced algorithms and AI-based robotic intelligence and monetized these into commercially-viable products," said Yicheng Li, Partner, Tsinghua AI Fund. "We are eager to support the company and Zhe's leadership as it expands its offering into a complete ecosystem of home robots to serve a wide range of people's needs."

"We support Trifo's vision for AI home robots, which goes beyond traditional cleaning capabilities," said Rick Liang, Senior Vice President of Yidu Cloud. "With the strategic investment in Trifo, we look forward to enhancing the home robot experience into a new dimension (i.e., healthy home and consumer-level health monitoring)."

Trifo Develops an Ecosystem of Home Robots

Trifo's vision is to build a family of home robots that enhance people's lives and let them focus on what's important. Its first products were smart home robot vacuums and rapidly evolved into AI home robots with the introduction of Lucy. Trifo's next innovation will include home robots that address personal needs such as personal healthcare management, home environment understanding and monitoring, and entertainment services. Look for new, exciting Trifo innovations in late-2020.

About Trifo

Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Trifo is a full stack AI home robot company. Focusing on indoor home environments, Trifo creates end-to-end integrated hardware/software systems with sensing, perception and decision-making capabilities. These robots help people live better lives by perceiving physics, geometry and semantics of home environments, communicating with humans in a natural way and continuously learning new skills with advanced AI technologies.

Trifo has earned more than 50 U.S. and Chinese patents and filed for more than 70 additional patents globally in U.S., Europe and China. Trifo's proprietary algorithms have been published at top robotics conferences such as ICRA and IROS.