Construction robotics startup Teleo has raised $16.2 million in funding to bridge the data gap in the robotics industry, with the goal of reaching a "ChatGPT moment" that will revolutionize the field.

The funding, which consists of two extensions to its 2022 Series A round, will be used to scale customer deployments, expand to new industries, and enhance the startup's AI capabilities. Teleo's retrofitted machinery allows customers to operate their existing fleets semi-autonomously, collecting valuable data that can be used to train true robotic foundation models.

Teleo's CEO, Vinay Shet, believes that the data collected will eventually enable the replacement or augmentation of human operators with cloud-based AI agents, capable of learning to control different machines. The startup's strategy involves deploying rapidly across several industries, including construction, pulp and paper, logging, and agriculture, to maintain a diverse dataset.