Alloy, a robotics data analytics platform, has raised US$4.5 million in its pre-seed funding round.
The funding round was led by Blackbird Ventures with support from Airtree, US-based robotics investor Xtal Ventures, and Skip Capital.
Several angel investors also joined in, including senior engineering leaders and founders from Waymo, Tesla, Halter, Reach Robotics, and Carbon Robotics. The Eucalyptus cofounders also invested in the round.
Alloy was founded in Sydney in early 2025 by CEO Joe Harris, who earlier worked as CCO at Eucalyptus. The platform helps robotics teams save time by reducing the need to manually go through large amounts of data or build costly custom systems.
Joe Harris explained that Alloy allows teams to automatically organize, search, and analyze all kinds of robot data using simple natural language.
“When robot failures occur, engineers spend days manually hunting through hundreds of files to diagnose edge cases, searching for needles in a data haystack,” he said.
“When we talk to robotics companies, they often tell us they have to leave behind 99% of their data. I sit there wondering – how do you know which 1% is the right 1%?. At the moment, it’s mostly based on people on the ground anecdotally telling them what to look at. It’s quite difficult to validate that. We want to help them find that right 1% and accelerate that process.”
Harris said the problem becomes more acute as companies scale, and then deal with terabytes of data every month.
“We’ve seen it with drones, and recently cars. They’ve gone from pure hardware to becoming rolling computers that act in the world,” Harris said.
“We believe this pattern is about to accelerate across every vertical. And with this rate of growth, 95% of the robotics companies that will exist in 10 years aren’t here yet.”
Alloy already has pilot partners in different fields, including oceanic inspections (Hullbot), defense AI (Breaker), maritime automation (Greenroom Robotics), and agriculture (Carbon Robotics).
With Alloy’s platform, engineers can use natural language to ask questions, such as “show me voltage spikes in rough seas.” The system finds the answer in minutes instead of days by spotting patterns and pulling out the right footage, sensor data and logs. This lets human experts focus on bigger, more complex problems.
Joe Harris says the platform also makes robotics more accessible for smaller companies that lack the vast resources of giants like Amazon or Tesla.
“Every transformative industry needs its foundational infrastructure moment,” he said.
“For the internet it was AWS, for AI it was GPU clouds. For robotics, it’s a unified data infrastructure. We’re building the layer that lets thousands of robotics companies move from programming robots to learning from experience.”
“When I graduated as an electrical engineer, there were no real roles for hardware in Australia, other than working at the railway. Now we’re building the infrastructure for an entirely new industry. We are already supporting some of the most advanced robotics companies in Australia, and beginning our expansion into the US.”
Blackbird partner Tom Humphrey said every robotics company will need Alloy’s solution.
“We backed Alloy because they’re solving a universal problem that only gets bigger as robotics scales and automation techniques advance,” he said.
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