Robotics and AI startup, OpenMind, has secured a $20 million investment on Monday, August 4. The funding will be used towards the creation of its operating system for robots — which the company terms as the “Android for robots”. Pantera Capital has reportedly led the funding round, however, details on the exact amount of the investment it poured remains undisclosed.
OpenMind confirmed the funding on X — sharing a video of its CEO, Jan Liphardt alongside a humanoid robot making the announcement official.
“We are excited to announce our $20 million raise to help robots go from tools to team-mates,” the video showed the robot as saying.
Founded in 2024, OpenMind claims to be building the next generation of “thinking machines” — powered by a network that connects them similar to how Google’s Android platform unifies laptops, smartphones, and smart home devices — irrespective of their hardware configurement. The name of this OS that will likely interconnect robots is “FABRIC”.
OpenMind sees itself as a company that will bring more collaboration between machines and humans. Along with Pentera, other investors that the company managed to rope-in include Coinbase Ventures, Ribbit, and Pebblebed also joined Pantera in funding OpenMind among others.
FABRIC, robots, AI: OpenMind’s roadmap
The FABRIC OS is being designed to be decentralized in nature — giving it a blockchain twist. With this OS, the company wishes to deploy a “trust layer” to let robots using FABRIC to connect and work together — distinguishing them from the rising number of bots surfacing on the internet.
As per the OpenMind CEO has, FABRIC is the company’s initiative to pull the robotics technology out of currently existing soiled ecosystems.
“If AI is the brain and robotics is the body, coordination is the nervous system. We’re building the system that lets machines reason, act and evolve together,” The Block quoted Liphardt as saying.
As part of its operational roadmap, the Dublin, Ireland-headquartered company plans to provide tools to help developers and institutions deploy robots across diverse hardware platforms. The broader aim is to incentivize data sharing and robotic improvement among interconnected machines on a large scale.
For now, the FABRIC OS is still under development. The company has not committed to an exact timeline of by when the system will be ready for use.
As part of its X announcement, OpenMind said its waitlist to access FABRIC is live.
“By joining the waitlist, you will be able to earn points by connecting your Twitter, Discord, and referring your friends. We will accept people off the waitlist based on rank, and these users will be able to start earning our protocol’s rewards points immediately,” the announcement noted.