Loop Robots cleans up with a $2M seed investment

Loop Robots is ready to sprout after the successful closing of its seed investment round. The robotics startup raked in 2 million dollars (around 1.7M euros) to accelerate the deployment of its automated surface disinfection robots for hospitals. Support in the seed round came from a group of private entrepreneurial investors and was led by SME investor Nanotech Ventures and the Locapes Investment Fund.

Sam, Loop’s disinfecting robot, is based on the surveillance robot with the same name (link in Dutch), developed by the now-defunct Robot Security Systems. This outfit was part of Robot Robots Company together with Robot Care Systems, both of which went bankrupt in 2019. Instead of surveillance, however, the smart robot is now designed to make medical-grade sanitization faster, safer and digitally auditable – helping to fight hospital-acquired infections. Additionally, it helps reduce the use of chemicals as it utilizes a powerful germicidal UVC light to deactivate up to 99.9999 percent of bacteria, viruses and other pathogens.

“We provide a super-human tool, our cobot Sam, to the cleaning staff in hospitals, and it helps them create a safer hospital environment without needing to work with chemical wipes and biocides,” says Loop Robots CEO and co-founder Per Slycke. “After having worked very closely with several leading hospitals in the Benelux, making sure the cleaning staff loves working with Sam, we’re ready to scale up implementations of our validated and certified automated disinfection cobot. Unlike previous generations of UVC disinfection robots, Sam is easy to integrate into the operational workflow of cleaning staff in the hospital, which is key to large-scale use.”