Viabot

Viabot is a US developer of autonomous outdoor property-care robots that sweep parking lots and other paved commercial sites without an operator. The company describes its robots as engineered in California and sells them through a robotics-as-a-service model in which repairs, parts, consumables, labour and trip charges are included in the service rather than billed separately. Customers manage their sites through a web dashboard and a client portal at myviabot.com.

Viabot was co-founded by Gregg Ratanaphanyarat, chief executive, and Dawei Ding, chief technology officer, who began building outdoor maintenance robots as Penn State undergraduates. The company took part in the HAX hardware accelerator run by SOSV and emerged publicly in May 2021 with 6.1 million US dollars in seed funding and a prototype called RUNO, which was piloted at Bay Area properties. Its current product, Viabot One, replaced that prototype.

Viabot One is designed to run unattended every night on a schedule set by the customer. It launches from its dock, sweeps, returns to empty its collected debris into a standard 65-gallon rolling trash can, recharges and reports back. The company states a runtime of up to six hours per run and says the robot handles debris up to 10 inches, including fine dust, gravel, leaves, litter and organic material. The robot and dock fit within a single parking space, and the dock requires only a standard 120 V outlet. Navigation relies on 3D mapping of the facility and dynamic path planning; press coverage of the 2026 funding round lists cameras, lidar, depth sensors and differential GPS in the sensor package. Because the robot patrols the same routes nightly, Viabot also offers it as a monitoring tool for site activity, which it calls soft security, including detection of loitering and monitoring of assets.

The dashboard reports cleaning history, coverage, routes, run duration, alerts and site activity for a single property or a whole portfolio, and lets customers change schedules, adjust coverage areas and order additional cleanings. The company claims more than 5.1 billion square feet cleaned. Its stated customer segments include retailers, higher-education campuses, real estate owners and developers, property management firms, healthcare organisations and utilities; no customer names are published on the official site.

In September 2026 Viabot announced a 24 million US dollar Series A led by Walden International with CDIB Capital Group and Stalwart Ventures, joined by existing investors Baseline Ventures, Era Ventures, Morado Ventures and SOSV, bringing total capital raised to 43 million US dollars. The company said the proceeds would go to sales and engineering hires, new products and further development of Viabot One and its service operation.