Startup’s Bots Sweep Up Corporate Campuses

Gregg Ratanaphanyarat and Dawei Ding joined the ranks of college dropouts in 2016, leaving Penn State to launch a robotics startup for outdoor cleaning. Today that gamble appears to be paying off. The duo’s startup, ViaBot, is completing a pilot with a major firm to keep a Bay Area parking lot clean with its robots, an arrangement that is going well and could expand into more business. The founders say that outdoor maintenance is underserved by robotics because developers typically focus on just one area but building managers need multiple services. ViaBot aims to serve multiple needs for outdoors maintenance with a modular approach to its robots.