SA国际传媒

Roving robot Lucy doesn鈥檛 just zoom around your home vacuuming up dirt and bits of last night鈥檚 dinner. It also roams around each room to identify any unwanted visitors, with two cameras and built-in surveillance software.

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And sporting this spiffy and alert robot, startup has just raised $15 million Series B from investors that include Yidu Cloud, Tsinghua AI Fund and Matrix Partners. This brings the Santa Clara-based startup funding to $26 million, and the capital will be used for further product development and expansion into European and American markets.

What It Does

Founded in 2016, is working to make its mark in the smart home products industry, a sector CEO 蝉补颈诲听 , will be worth up to $28.4 billion this year. With Lucy, Trifo is betting that it can offer robots that do more than just vacuum, like Ironpie, its cleaning-only robot. The robots also can protect. To me, this reads that the startup wants to be a relied-upon and ingrained part of the family.

But, not so fast. A public, Bedford, Massachusetts-based competitor, , comes to mind. created the popular vacuum robot Roomba, which vacuums in homes. But, , it also has a fleet of other service-specific robots: one to mop floors, one (coming soon) to mow lawns, and one to teach kids how to code. The last robot, its newest, is a nod to iRobot offering more content than cleaning, and giving its robots a home in not just homes, but K-12 classrooms.

While iRobot doesn鈥檛 yet combine the features into one mega-robot, it does offer in which the mop robot and vacuum robot communicate with each other to get things clean. iRobot鈥檚 offerings range from $199 to $1,099, and Trifo鈥檚 Lucy hovers at around $799, according to .

Another startup working on these autonomous critters includes Pal Robotics. Except unlike Trifo, which focuses on home dynamics, has created robots to help with logistics; catering from everything from industrial plants, to hospitals and offices, Its prices are not disclosed on the website.

announcing the funding round, Trifo says that incoming innovation can include personal healthcare management and entertainment services.聽But, for the skeptical among us, no worries, robots can鈥檛 replace humans just yet. They have limits too: Trifo鈥檚 real-time objection detection lets it avoid obstacles, and that means, the company says, .

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