Overview
- Walden announced a $300 million seed round that values the Cambridge startup at $1.1 billion and includes strategic backers such as Toyota, Deviation Capital, NVIDIA and Boeing.
- The company, spun out of the Toyota Research Institute and co‑founded by MIT professor Russ Tedrake, says its wheeled, upper‑body humanoid machines are already performing production work inside a Toyota plant.
- Walden’s robots run on so‑called large behavior models and a technique called Diffusion Policy, which let machines learn new manipulation and decision skills through on‑the‑job experience rather than task‑by‑task reprogramming.
- The startup plans to use the capital to expand product development, build manufacturing capacity, and sell into aerospace, semiconductors, electronics, logistics and life‑sciences customers.
- Investors and analysts say the round ranks among the largest for the Boston‑area robotics scene, but the key test will be whether Walden’s continuously learning robots can deliver value outside a single tightly controlled plant.