Waymo provides about 500,000 paid rides each week across 10 US cities, using a fleet of 3,000 vehicles, TechCrunch reported earlier. Each car needs to be charged several times a day. Most depots still rely on people to plug and unplug charging cables thousands of times a day, slows down operations and makes it hard to grow robotaxi fleets.
Rocsys, a Dutch-American startup founded in 2019 by Crijn Bouman, Joost van der Weijde, and Kanter van Deurzen, based in Rijswijk and operating in Portland, Oregon, has raised $13 million in a Series A extension to tackle this problem. The company says it has developed the world’s first hands-free charging system capable of serving several bays at once in robotaxi depots.
Capricorn Partners led the round, with Scania Invest and Forward.One, SEB Greentech Venture Capital, and Graduate Ventures are also investing. Rocsys has now raised a total of $56 million.
Rocsys’s robotic arm is mounted on an overhead rail that moves along a row of bays and can serve up to 10 vehicles from a single unit. The arm uses AI computer vision and motion control to find the charging port and plug in or unplug across different EV models, charger types, and connector standards.
Rocsys claims a plug-in success rate of over 99.9% in real-world use.
Rocsys built the system using more than six years of data from port and logistics sites, where it first tested the technology. The company has over 130 granted patents and pending applications. In a depot with 50 bays, Rocsys estimates the M1 can boost efficiency by up to 75% with the same staff and save up to $1.7 million each year.
Rocsys rivals, Volkswagen and Hyundai, have shown robotic charging prototypes, and ABB is developing automated charging systems for commercial fleets. Unlike them, the startup uses a multi-bay overhead rail system and focuses on the economics of robotaxi depots, a market that these car makers are not mainly targeting.
The $13 million will help Rocsys scale up and deploy its proven solutions in a market that is expected to need them soon.
