Not Science Fiction Anymore: Mail.ru’s Dmitry Grishin Launches $25M Robotics Fund
In the classic Isaac Asimov robot series of science fiction books, robots have become intelligent and attempted to take over the human race.
We may not be at that stage yet, but robotic technology is close to reaching a new phase of mainstream consumer adoption. That’s the theory behind a new $25 million fund from Dmitry Grishin, the co-founder and CEO of Russia Internet giant Mail.Ru.
Grishin is most well known for his role with Mail.ru, but Grishin is a robotics enthusiast, having studied robotics and complex automation at Moscow University. The new fund, which is funded exclusively with Grishin’s personal funds, is focusing on companies that brings robotics to consumer markets. The fund will be headquartered in New York, but invest globally in areas such as home maintenance, healthcare, education, entertainment-basically any mass consumer market. Grishin remains the head of Mail.ru and will have employees handling day-to-day operations of Grishin Robotics. “I’m a big believer that robotics wil be the next huge industry,” Grishin says.
The robotics industry now is where the personal computing industry was in the 1980s: ripe for mainstream adoption and poised for massive growth, Grishin says. Technology has advanced to make production of robotics much cheaper now. While it took perhaps $100,000 to build a robot 30 years ago, now it can be built for a fraction of that cost, he says, pointing to things like smartphone technology, 3d scanners and Microsoft’s Kinect platform. Now much manufacturing can also be outsourced to Asia cheaply, he says. “People have been dreaming about robotics for the last 40 years, but hte key issue was it was very expensive to build robots,” he says.