Kewazo's lifting robot, Liftbot, has been deployed at more than 20 industrial sites in North America and Europe, including refineries, petrochemical plants, chemical complexes, power facilities and construction sites. Owners and contractors are using it as a replacement for tasks usually handled by cranes, manual scaffolding erection and manual material handling.

The Physical AI Future of Industrial Sites

Kewazo has been collecting structured operational data from its deployments everywhere from Houston to Ireland. The company is now using that data and this funding round to build out its physical artificial intelligence platform.

The backing of Chevron Technology Ventures and Asahi Kasei—two large players in energy and materials—is new in this funding round. Kewazo CEO and co-founder Artem Kuchukov said the capital will accelerate deployment capacity, expand the firm into additional workflows and deepen integration within existing customer sites. 

"Our clients hear about robotics, but they rarely see robots operating at their plants,” Kuchukov says. "Kewazo changes that. We help industrial asset owners adopt automation by delivering instant value in vertical material movement, and many clients already ask us to expand into additional workflows. With the support of Schooner Capital, Chevron Technology Ventures, Asahi Kasei, and our existing investors, we’re accelerating this shift."

Funding round leader Schoonover cited Kewazo's planned investment in AI as a major driver for their investment, as automation continues to change construction and heavy industry.

"Robotics and automation are transforming industrial operations, mirroring the adoption of AI across the economy," said Alexandra Manick, managing director at Schooner Capital.

Procore Partners With NVIDIA

On March 16 at NVIDIA's GPU Compute technology conference in San Jose, Calif., Procore announced an integration between its construction management platform and the NVIDIA Omniverse DSX Blueprint, aimed at improving how complex infrastructure such as high-performance data centers or, in NVIDIA's words, "AI factories," are designed and built. 

Since these facilities are being codesigned at ecosystem scale for hyper-scaler clients that want maximum efficiency, even a minor construction change made in the field can cause major problems such as disrupting airflow or impeding GPU performance. NVIDIA and Procore seek to address this challenge by helping building teams model their design changes in a high-fidelity, physically accurate 3D model.

"What is built in the real world often drifts from the intended plan the moment a project breaks ground," said Steve Davis, president of product and technology at Procore. "Our integration with the NVIDIA Omniverse DSX Blueprint keeps that digital thread unbroken. By moving beyond static drawings and models to predictive AI simulations, we’ll help our customers to mitigate risk and improve performance in ways that were previously impossible."

According to the agreement, the companies are unifying Procore’s "system of work and collaboration" with the NVIDIA Omniverse virtual and augmented reality systems to connect construction data with the digital world in real time. Procore will act as the central hub, automatically translating and syncing complex 3D models from over 15 different BIM and CAD formats into one live digital twin that is accelerated with NVIDIA Omniverse libraries.  

By synchronizing project data, leveraging NVIDIA Omniverse libraries and OpenUSD, the open-source industry standard for 3D interoperability, this framework and workflow is intended to produce a digital twin that is fully optimized for operations at the end of the project.