Backing Watney to Automate Data Centers

Building Autonomous Robotics for Critical Infrastructure

We’re excited to invest in Watney Robotics’ Series A. Since co-leading Watney’s seed round in January 2025, we’ve watched the company grow from two founders testing robots in a Berkeley strawberry field into a team deploying autonomous systems in some of the world’s most demanding environments.

Watney is building autonomous robotics for critical infrastructure, starting with data centers. In less than two years, the company has begun deployments with some of the largest companies in the world.

From Berry Farms to Server Farms

When we first met Ryan Gannon and Sean Cheong, they were building robots to pick strawberries.

Over the next year, we stayed in touch as their ambition broadened. They came to see strawberry harvesting as one example of a much larger opportunity: automating the physical work that still underpins enormous industries. That realization eventually took them from berry farms to server farms.

Ryan and Sean approached the problem with an unusual level of intensity. They rented a loft in the Mission, lived in one room, and worked around the clock in another. To test their systems, they recreated a data center environment in the building next door.

It was an early example of how they would go on to build Watney: deploy robotics in the real world (not the lab) to collect data which in turn would improve their product.

Why Data Centers

We are in the midst of the largest infrastructure build-out in history. Data centers are the physical backbone of the AI economy, and much of the work required to stand up and operate these facilities is painstakingly manual.

People still handle cables and components, move through tight and irregular spaces, and perform repetitive tasks where small mistakes can be expensive. At the same time, labor is increasingly scarce and delays are costly.

That makes data centers a natural starting point for autonomy: the work is valuable, repetitive, and increasingly difficult to scale with people alone. But it is also technically demanding. Robots have to operate reliably in environments that vary from facility to facility, handle edge cases, and perform day after day with very little tolerance for failure.

For Watney, that difficulty is a feature, not a bug.

Building Autonomy Through Deployment

We believe some of the most valuable robotics companies will be built not by starting with a general-purpose robot and searching for work, but by starting with valuable work and earning greater autonomy over time. That is the path Watney has taken from the beginning.

Building a robot that performs a task is one thing. Building a system that customers can depend on every day is much harder. Reliability comes from confronting the thousands of details that only emerge in real operating environments.

Ryan and Sean have built Watney around that learning loop: deploy, learn, improve, repeat. Each deployment creates value for customers today while giving Watney the data, edge cases, and operating experience required to expand what its platform can autonomously handle tomorrow.

We’re excited to continue backing Ryan, Sean, and the Watney team as they build it.