WIRE)--Airbus Ventures announces its latest investment in Telexistence, Inc., a leading innovator in remote-controlled robotics with artificial intelligence that has closed a $20M Series A-2 financing round led by a group company of Monoful Inc. and comprising additional funds from KDDI, Deepcore, UTokyo IPC, and multiple new investors. Telexistence has raised about $41 million to date, since the company's inception in 2017. "As we rethink and transform the basic meaning of'existence,' we are actively expanding our in-house engineering team, accelerating product development, and upscaling deployment to the company's growing customer base in offline retail and logistics," explains Jin Tomioka, Telexistence CEO and co-Founder. "This funding signals a new chapter, and we are excited to welcome new partners, still more grateful than ever for Airbus Ventures, our lead Series A investor in 2018, and their mentorship and dedication to our mission." Materializing a vision of a more connected humanity interacting and evolving across multiple spatial and temporal scales, Telexistence releases humans from physical constraints utilizing Telexistence technology, robotics, telecommunication, VR, haptics, and AI.

Working alongside an industrial robot can be frustrating and even downright dangerous. But a new sensing system could make human-robot collaboration a cinch. Humatics, an MIT spinout, is developing an indoor radar system that should give robots and other industrial systems the ability to track people's movements very precisely. This could make industrial systems significantly safer, make it possible to track worker performance in greater detail, and lead to more effective new forms of collaboration between people and machines. "We very much see this enabling robots to live in human environments," says David Mindell, a professor in the aeronautics and astronautics department at MIT, who is the company's cofounder and CEO.