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Watney Robotics has raised $80 million in Series A funding to scale robots built for data center and supercomputing infrastructure, bringing the startup's total funding to more than $100 million.
The round was co-led by Valor Atreides AI Fund and Hummingbird Ventures, with continued participation from Conviction, Abstract, A*, and Grant Gordon, according to Watney's announcement.
Founded by Ryan Gannon and Sean Cheong, Watney develops autonomous robotic systems for physical infrastructure work inside data centers. The company has been serving some of the world's largest hyperscalers since 2025, including Meta, and now operates what it describes as the largest U.S. fleet of dexterous robots running 24/7/365.
Watney's raise comes as AI infrastructure demand continues to push data center construction, operations, and capital spending into a more competitive phase. Hyperscalers can finance new compute capacity, but building and operating that capacity still depends on physical execution. That work covers facilities, wiring, racks, maintenance, logistics, and the labor required to keep increasingly dense compute environments running.
That is the constraint Watney says it is trying to address. Watney's robots are not general-purpose humanoids for homes or broad consumer tasks. The company focuses on work where robotic embodiment can create an operational advantage through precision and repeatability.
"We don’t imitate human motions or processes. We care about the new, differentiated capabilities robots can unlock. We work on problems where our choice of embodiment gives us an order of magnitude advantage, whether through precision, reliability, or scale."
Watney says its systems have already accumulated hundreds of thousands of hours in customer facilities while achieving more than four nines of reliability. In uptime terms, "four nines" generally refers to 99.99% availability, a standard data center operators expect, because downtime, delays, and maintenance interruptions can be costly.
The company's work includes tasks such as cable swapping, a narrow example of the physical maintenance that becomes more demanding as data centers scale. Cable management, component access, and infrastructure servicing can create bottlenecks even when capital, chips, and power contracts are available.
The new funding gives Watney more capital to expand as hyperscalers continue racing to bring additional compute online. If the company can maintain reliability while scaling deployment, its robots could become part of the physical operating layer behind the next wave of AI data centers.
