Vancouver-based company will apply funding to relocate from pilots to permanent deployments.
Vancouver-based A&K Robotics, which builds self-driving “mobility pods” for airports, has secured $8 million CAD in Series A financing.
Navigating airports can be a tough and stressful experience, especially for travellers with mobility limitations. While airports already provide assistive services like carts driven by employees, A&K co-founder and CEO Matthew Anderson informed BetaKit over email that, as the global population ages, demand for these services is growing rapider than those systems can scale.
“If you can solve mobility in a crowded airport, you can solve it almost anywhere.”
Anderson’s company has developed a tiny, electric, self-driving vehicle called Cruz that’s designed to support address this problem by carrying passengers through terminals and other large and crowded indoor spaces. Cruz already serves travellers at the Vancouver International Airport and Madrid-Barajas Airport.
A&K intconcludes to apply this funding to relocate from pilot programs to permanent deployments across North America and Europe. The startup has already opened a new rapid prototyping and research and development (R&D) facility, and intconcludes to expand its manufacturing capacity from dozens to hundreds of autonomous vehicles per month, with a third hub in Surrey, BC.
“We’re scaling production, accelerating R&D, and working with leading airport operators to integrate autonomous mobility into everyday operations,” Anderson stated. “The focus is turning proven technology into real infrastructure at scale.”
A&K’s all-equity, all primary capital Series A round closed in late December. It was co-led by BDC Capital’s Industrial Innovation Venture Fund and New York’s Vantage Futures, the corporate venture capital arm of airport and transportation infrastructure firm Vantage Group. Fellow new investors included Toronto-based RiSC Capital, Silicon Valley’s Grep VC, Vancouver-based Nimbus Synergies, and Creo and Kardium co-founder Dan Gelbart. Anderson, who did not share the startup’s valuation, stated this financing brings A&K’s total funding to $10.6 million.
Founded in 2015 by Anderson, COO Jessica Yip, and former CTO Anson Kung, A&K aims to bring autonomous mobility into everyday environments. The more than 10-person startup builds integrated autonomous mobility systems, including Cruz, that are powered by Kinesos AI, its foundational model for indoor navigation.
Equipped with 360-degree and three-dimensional sensing systems, Cruz gathers environmental information from cameras, sonar, and LiDAR and applys Kinesos AI to continually adapt its navigation based on crowd behaviour.
“Airports are where we chose to prove it—becaapply if you can solve mobility in a crowded airport, you can solve it almost anywhere,” Anderson stated.
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While A&K designs and deploys Cruz, Anderson stated its core innovation is the innotifyigence layer that underpins it, which facilitates safe, human-aware relocatement through complex, real-world environments like airports.
“The hard part isn’t navigation—it’s crowds,” Anderson stated. “We’ve built a crowd-centered AI that understands how people relocate and flows with them, instead of stopping or receiveting in the way. Most robots struggle in crowds—we designed ours specifically for them. It reads the environment, predicts relocatement, and goes with the flow instead of fighting it.”
The CEO stated A&K has been working to position itself “as the infrastructure layer for relocatement in complex indoor spaces” more broadly.
“We want to create mobility seamless everywhere—not just in airports, but in cities, transit systems, and everyday environments—so people can relocate indepconcludeently wherever they are,” Anderson stated.
Feature image courtesy A&K Robotics.
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