Robotics startup FieldAI, Orange County’s newest unicorn, has completed a lease for a new, larger headquarters in Irvine, as it looks to ramp up hiring efforts in the area.
The two-year-old company, whose technology allows different types of robots to operate autonomously in a variety of settings, recently completed a deal to lease the entirety of 3 Morgan, a 41,000-square-foot R&D building in the Irvine Spectrum.
The two-story building, located off Alton Parkway near an Albertsons distribution facility, is owned by Irvine Company. The building includes a mix of office, lab and warehouse space, according to Irvine Co. marketing materials.
The deal marks one of the larger expansions in space for an area company of late. Field AI had been operating out of roughly 13,000 square feet of space in a Mission Viejo business park, according to CoStar records.
The move to Irvine had been expected; the company had been describing itself as an Irvine-based firm in recent news coverage. CEO Ali Agha told the Business Journal in early September that a move was in the works.
The space is needed as the company expands its local headcount. Field AI currently lists over 50 open positions on its website, in a variety of engineering, software and customer-facing roles. Most are for OC-based positions.
$405M Funding
The real estate move marks the biggest news for FieldAI since late August, when the company came out of stealth mode and announced that it had raised $405 million in a pair of funding rounds.
The robotics company’s valuation jumped to $2 billion from $500 million, placing it in the “unicorn” category of startups worth more than $1 billion. It is now one of Orange County’s most valuable privately held tech firms.
The Aug. 20 financing announcement included a just-completed $314 million round.
Field AI’s funding comes from several prominent venture capital firms, as well as the family offices of some of the world’s wealthiest people. Backers include Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and NVentures, the venture capital arm of Nvidia.
“Some robots don’t just need great ‘bodies,’ they need great brains, too,” Gates wrote in a blog post last year. “That’s what FieldAI—a robotics company based in Southern California that doesn’t build robots—is trying to create.”
“Instead of focusing on the hardware of these machines, FieldAI is developing AI software for other companies’ robots that enables them to perceive their environments, navigate without GPS (on land, by water, or in the air), and even communicate with each other,” Gates said.
Field Robotics
FieldAI says its architecture “marks a breakthrough in the robotics space.”
Its systems operate in real-time autonomously, with decisions made directly by the models, seamlessly integrating into real customer workflows.
The company’s technology is designed to enable safe and reliable robot behaviors when managing scenarios that they have not been trained on, navigating dynamic, unstructured environments without prior maps, GPS or predefined paths.
“Our team has spent years in the field, driving major breakthroughs in ‘field robotics’ and safety-critical robotic AI in complex environments,” said Agha, who lives in Mission Viejo.
Several top executives at FieldAI have connections that include Qualcomm, NASA and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Agha conducted postdoctoral studies at MIT and worked seven years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
