ANYbotics is turning Ex-certified quadrupeds into a hazardous-site inspection layer

ANYbotics raised an additional $60 million on December 12, 2024, bringing total funding above $130 million and tying the round to U.S. expansion. The company had opened a Silicon Valley office a month earlier to support North American industrial inspection customers, giving the financing a service-footprint angle rather than only a product-development story.

ANYbotics was founded in 2016 as an ETH Zurich spin-off and recorded first sales in 2017. Co-founder P?ter Fankhauser is CEO, and the company now operates across Zurich and San Francisco. The company's main commercial surface is ANYmal, a quadruped inspection robot built for industrial facilities where sending people into routine rounds can be costly, dangerous, or operationally inefficient.

ANYmal X is the product that makes the hazardous-site story specific. It is certified for ATEX and IECEx Zone 1 IIB operation, carries IP67 ingress protection, and operates between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius. ANYbotics redesigned the robot with a pressurized main body filled with inert nitrogen gas and revised actuators to reduce ignition risk in explosive atmospheres.

The inspection payload combines a 20x optical zoom camera, thermal camera, and microphone. The thermal camera reads from minus 10 to 400 degrees Celsius, while the pan-tilt unit covers wide vertical and horizontal movement. ANYbotics lists open grated stairs, cramped spaces, slippery terrain, fixed platforms, floating vessels, and multi-floor facilities among the conditions ANYmal X is built to handle.

The customer signal is stronger than a generic inspection pitch. The December 2024 financing announcement named customer orders from BP, Equinor, and Petrobras, and ANYbotics also lists partnerships with AWS, NVIDIA, and SAP. The competitive field includes Boston Dynamics Spot industrial payloads, Energy Robotics software deployments, Ghost Robotics, Unitree-based inspection integrations, Flyability, and human inspection rounds. ANYbotics' distinction is certified operation in hazardous atmospheres, where ordinary quadruped inspection systems cannot simply be sent in.

Public material still does not show delivered robot counts by customer, site-level uptime, service response time, customer training procedures, or maintenance protocols that preserve Ex ratings. The strategic question is whether ANYmal X can turn certification into a repeatable inspection fleet business. If ANYbotics keeps industrial customers supported across hazardous sites, it becomes a plant-inspection layer for energy and chemicals operators rather than a quadruped hardware vendor.

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