Robotics companies around the world are facing a deceptively simple but increasingly complex challenge: data overload. Even a basic robot can generate up to a terabyte of information every day from its sensors, cameras, and other onboard systems. While this continuous data collection is essential for performance and safety, it creates a mountain of information that is difficult to process, organize, and analyze.
Sydney-based startup Alloy believes it has the solution. Founded in 2025 by Joe Harris, Alloy is building dedicated data infrastructure for robotics firms, helping them manage, label, and make sense of the vast amounts of information their machines produce. The company’s tools are designed to encode and label raw data, while also allowing users to search it using natural language queries. Engineers can set up rules to automatically flag anomalies, much like how observability tools highlight errors in software systems.
“The current pattern is, you look for some kind of anomaly, and then you’ll replay the data,” Harris explained. “Companies then spend hours scrubbing through this information, trying to diagnose issues, but they don’t have a clear view of whether it’s a recurring, high-severity problem or just an isolated case.”
Harris, who has long been fascinated by robotics, recognized this pain point after years of working at Australian tech companies including Atlassian and Eucalyptus. Initially, he considered building robots for agriculture and vertical farming, but conversations with fellow founders kept circling back to one core challenge: data management. Realizing this bottleneck was universal across robotics, he pivoted to address it directly.
Alloy officially launched in February 2025 and has already signed four Australian robotics companies as design partners. The startup is now preparing to expand into the U.S. market, where demand for scalable robotics infrastructure is rapidly growing. Customers have expressed enthusiasm, particularly because many have struggled to build and maintain their own ad-hoc data systems. Alloy positions itself as a specialized alternative, similar to how Databricks transformed enterprise data science but focused squarely on robotics.
To support its growth, Alloy recently raised AUD $4.5 million (about USD $3 million) in a pre-seed round led by Blackbird Ventures, with participation from Airtree Ventures, Xtal Ventures, Skip Capital, and several angel investors from the robotics sector.
At present, Alloy has relatively few direct competitors. Many robotics firms are still retrofitting generic data tools not designed for multimodal inputs like video, lidar, or telemetry, or attempting to create their own in-house platforms. Alloy sees this as an opportunity to establish itself as the go-to infrastructure layer for robotics data.
As robotics adoption accelerates across industries from logistics to agriculture to healthcare, the scale of data challenges will only intensify. Harris hopes Alloy can play a pivotal role in enabling future robotics companies to focus less on “data plumbing” and more on delivering reliable, innovative machines. “It’s never been a better time to build a robotics company,” he said. “We want the next 100,000 robotics firms to start with the right tools, without having to reinvent the wheel.”
