Watney Raises $80M to Put Robots on Meta's Cabling Work
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Watney Raises $80M to Put Robots on Meta's Cabling Work
The Series A values a company whose own reliability claim, four nines, is unverified outside its customer contracts, and whose most public reference deployment still runs under human supervision.
Watney, a startup that builds robots for maintenance work inside data centers, raised an $80 million Series A, the company said in a post announcing the round, co-led by the Valor Atreides AI Fund and Hummingbird Ventures with continued backing from Conviction, Abstract and A*, plus investor Grant Gordon. The round pushes Watney's total funding past $100 million, on top of a $21 million seed round previously led by Conviction, Abstract and A*.
Watney was founded in San Francisco in 2023 by chief executive Ryan Gannon and co-founder Sean Cheong. The company describes its approach as deliberately not mimicking human movement: "We don't imitate human motions or processes," it said in the announcement. "We care about the new, differentiated capabilities robots can unlock." Since 2025, Watney says it has run an end-to-end deployment model for hyperscale customers, sending robots to swap cables and restart servers inside live facilities, the same physical-labor pitch that has drawn funding to wheeled warehouse machines like Maven Robotics' dual-armed picker.
The reliability number is Watney's own
Watney's post says its systems have logged "more than four nines," or 99.99 percent, of reliability across hundreds of thousands of hours in customer facilities, and that it now runs what it calls the largest fleet of dexterous robots operating around the clock in the United States. Both figures are vendor-supplied; neither appears in any customer's own disclosure, and Watney's post does not name a single customer.
What one customer's own workers describe
One of those customers is Meta. Since June 2025, Meta has been testing two dual-armed Watney robots on cabling work at its data center campus in Altoona, Iowa, with related trials underway at its Prometheus facility in New Albany, Ohio, according to TechRepublic's report on interviews with current and former Meta employees. Eric Xu, Meta's senior robotics manager, has discussed the company's robotics ambitions publicly; a Meta worker quoted by TechRepublic said a mature cable-swapping system could eventually eliminate up to 80 percent of the workload in some technician roles.
That gap between vendor claim and field account is the story's real center. TechRepublic reported the Watney robots remain slower than human technicians and still operate under supervision, meaning the 99.99 percent reliability figure describes a system that has not yet been left to work unattended at the site where outside reporting exists to check it.
Watney is not the only robot Meta is testing
Meta is running a Kinova six-axis robotic arm for server power-cycling and ABB machines for component reseating alongside Watney's robots at its Ohio site, giving Watney at least two general-purpose competitors inside the same customer. Purpose-built data-center rivals are also forming: Zurich-based Exclaim Robotics, founded by former Google, Microsoft and Nvidia roboticist Helen Oleynikova, emerged from stealth with a $4.95 million pre-seed round to build a mobile robot for cleaning optics and reseating drives. Oleynikova told TechRepublic the field so far has produced "a lot of pilots and demos, but no provable working solution," a description that applies as much to Watney's own Meta pilot as to anyone else's. It is also the same description investors have been willing to fund past, the way they funded Crusoe's $3.9 billion round for the compute side of the same AI data center buildout Watney is trying to staff.
| Company | Round | Amount | Data-center robotics focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Watney | Series A | $80 million | Cabling, server restarts, end-to-end deployment |
| Exclaim Robotics | Pre-seed | $4.95 million | Optics cleaning, cable reconnection, drive reseating |
What would confirm the number
Watney's $80 million round and its reliability claim both rest on the company's own account. The reference customer that could check it, Meta, has not confirmed Watney's specific figures and continues to run the robots under supervision rather than autonomously. The next event that would test the claim is whether Meta expands the Altoona pilot to unsupervised operation, or moves the contract to one of the general-purpose arms it is testing in parallel.
Sources
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