New report from Prosus Ventures argues the industry is close to reaching its “GPT-3 moment” and maps the companies to watch for across the US, Europe and Asia.
Prosus today published “We're Betting on the Robotics Frontier” a position paper laying out its view of the general-purpose robotics industry, along with a working map of 85 companies it believes are the key players to watch.
The report is the first from Prosus Ventures, the company’s early-stage investment arm that invests to fuel Prosus’s ecosystem growth. Today, its ecommerce ecosystems in Latin America, Europe and India serve more than 1billion customers globally.
The report argues robotics is close to reaching its “GPT-3 moment,” with reliability on narrow tasks jumping from about 65% in 2023 to 99.9% today, using a fraction of the training data. Prosus expects a “GPT-3 moment,” where models become reliable enough for real deployment, within about a year, and a “GPT-4 moment,” where a model can complete most simple tasks from a plain-language instruction alone, within a couple of years after that.
Falling hardware costs – fuelled in large part by China's electric-vehicle supply chain that feeds directly into robot batteries and actuators – are pushing the industry toward a genuinely useful, general-purpose robot priced around $20,000 within a couple of years, Prosus argues. That’s the point at which a robot becomes economical for key, large areas of the economy.
The report maps where robots are likely to arrive first — warehousing, logistics, and industrial inspection, followed by consumer and hospitality work, with healthcare and construction furthest out — based on a framework that weighs a task's environmental complexity against how much manipulation it demands, rather than how difficult the task looks to a human.
The report maps the emerging industry across 85 companies in the US, Europe and Asia, segmented by five layers: foundation-model developers, hardware makers, vertically-integrated players, application companies, and supporting infrastructure.
“Robotics is where AI stops living on a screen and starts doing real work in the physical world,” said Thiago Viana de Silva, Prosus Ventures Global Head. “We've spent months in the room with the teams building the industry, and the pace of progress convinces us it's one of the biggest opportunities for us today – both as investors and builders of AI systems. We believe robotics is potentially months away from its GPT-3 moment and we are actively looking for opportunities to invest ahead of that.”
Prosus will keep its market map updated as the industry evolves, and invites founders building any part of the robotics stack – foundation models, actuators, data pipelines, or applications – to reach out directly.
The full report is available here.
About Prosus Ventures
Prosus Ventures is the early-stage investment arm of Prosus, a global consumer internet group whose ecommerce ecosystems in Latin America, Europe and India serve more than 1 billion customers.
Prosus Ventures backs founders building the technologies that will shape Prosus’s ecosystems over the next decade. It invests off Prosus’s own balance sheet rather than third-party fund capital. Since 2015, we’ve deployed $2.3B+ across 100+ startups, in 20 countries globally.
About Dealroom.co
Dealroom.co is a global intelligence platform for discovering and tracking the most promising companies, technologies and ecosystems. Clients include many of the world’s foremost organizations such as Sequoia, Accel, Index Ventures, NATO Innovation Fund, NATO Diana, European Defence Fund, ESA, McKinsey, BCG, Deloitte, Google, AWS, Microsoft, Stripe.
Dealroom partners closely with local tech ecosystem development agencies and enablers, to create a comprehensive multi-dimensional blueprint of the tech ecosystem, including capital, talent, innovation, entrepreneurship and overall economic dynamism.
About Prosus
Prosus is the power behind the world’s leading lifestyle ecommerce brands, across Europe, India, and Latin America, unlocking an AI-first world for our 2 billion customers.
The Prosus technology ecosystem spans food delivery, payments, classifieds, travel, events, and mobility. Our integrated approach enhances user engagement and creates the foundation for unprecedented AI capabilities through proprietary data and cross-service intelligence.
Through Prosus Ventures, we invest in companies which inspire and support the Prosus ecosystem. We search for new opportunities at the leading edge of AI and ecommerce, the digital AI workforce and in frontier technologies, such as robotics, drones and synbio.
The team actively backs exceptional entrepreneurs who are using technology to improve people’s everyday lives.
To find out more, please visit www.prosus.com.
