Last summer, when RoboForce founder Leo Ma visited a solar farm outside Phoenix, the ground was hot enough to cook an egg on. Ma watched as workers traversed uninhabitable lands to spend hours securing millions of solar panels.
Over the years Ma has visited hundreds of factories, from chip makers to underground drilling sites. Each time, he saw humans working on menial and potentially dangerous tasks and came to the same conclusion: “These are the kind of jobs that we shouldn’t need people to do anymore,” he told TechCrunch.
Enter RoboForce, the company Ma founded 19 months ago with the ambition of creating hyper-accurate robot workers to do tasks like solar panel installation. The company’s inaugural product is a robot about one and a half meters tall with black metal arms (pictured above, somewhat like a bigger, headless Wall-E).
Today, the company announced $10 million in early-stage funding to build out Ma’s robot worker dream. Investors include Nobel Laureate economist Myron Scholes, well-known Chinese fund VC Gary Rieschel( formerly of SoftBank), and Ma’s alma mater Carnegie Mellon University.
“Roboforce is focusing on the most tedious, repetitive, force-demanding and the certain risk and dangerous work that shouldn’t have to be human to do it,” Ma said.
RoboForce is a continuation of Ma’s life’s work. Previously, he worked on autonomous driving software at Baidu USA, before he co-founded CYNGN, an automated driving company that Ma helped bring public. As he put it, “building AI robotics is all I do.”
RoboForce is starting with the solar panel market, where Ma said there’s a huge labor issue already. In 2024, about 53 gigawatts of solar projects were delayed because of worker shortages and long waits for equipment, according to data company Wood Mackenzie.
Ma said RoboForce will launch one to two pilot solar projects with its robots this year.
RoboForce is facing well-capitalized competition. This past summer, AES Corporation introduced the world to Maximo, a massive robot that the company claims will install solar panels twice as fast as a human.
But Ma isn’t worried, claiming that his product is the most accurate robot available. “RoboForce, proudly, is the first and the only one in the market that achieves both the AI model and the robot with the final action as one millimeter accuracy,” he said, adding that such accuracy allows the RoboForce robot to do fine motor tasks, like, say, tightening a screw in middle of the Arizona desert.
The desert is just the beginning for RoboForce. Their moonshot dream? “Helping build the moon base on the moon,” Ma said.
