Tutor Intelligence raises $75 million to rent out robot workers by the hour
Andreessen Horowitz led the Series B for the MIT spinout, whose Sonny and Cassie robots work warehouse jobs billed by the hour or by the pick.
Tutor Intelligence has raised $75 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz, the robotics company announced on November 2. The round brings Tutor's total capital raised to $117 million. Union Square Ventures, which led the company's $34 million Series A in December 2025, and Neo, which led its seed round, also participated.
The Watertown, Massachusetts company, spun out of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 2021, deploys two robot workers into factories and warehouses. Sonny is a two-armed semi-humanoid built for each-picking, grabbing individual items from bins and shelves. Cassie is a mobile manipulator that handles case picking and palletizing. Customers do not buy the robots: they rent them by the hour or by the pick, with no upfront purchase and no long-term contract, while Tutor owns, deploys and maintains the fleet.
The funding will support frontier robot foundation model training as well as manufacturing and deployment of the two robots. Tutor pre-trains its models at Data Factory 1, a facility of 100 bimanual manipulators that the company says generates more than 10,000 hours of robot manipulation training data every week. Nearly a third of the customers who received robots in the past year came back for more, and Tutor expects more than 1,000 robots under contract by the end of 2027.
The bet is on data, not just hardware. Robot AI has no internet to learn from, so every deployment doubles as a training run: each robot on the job makes the next one more capable. The hourly pricing removes the capital barrier that keeps smaller warehouses from automating, and three Andreessen Horowitz general partners co-authored the firm's investment post, a measure of how seriously it takes the thesis. The open question is whether the unit economics hold as the fleet scales from dozens of robots toward a thousand. "Deployment isn't just the destination for robotics research - it's how you overcome its limitations," said Raghu Raghuram, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.