companies

Telexistence Inc.

Tokyo robotics company whose teleoperated, AI-assisted arms restock chilled drink shelves in hundreds of Japanese convenience stores, backed by SoftBank and Foxconn.

Telexistence was founded in 2017 in Tokyo by Jin Tomioka, Genki Sano, and Charith Fernando, betting that convenience stores—rather than factories or warehouses—were the more immediate proving ground for commercial robotics, given how repetitive and physically constrained the daily restocking work already was. The company's first major deployment, TX SCARA, began automating drink-shelf restocking at FamilyMart's backyard storerooms, reaching 300 stores by 2022 in one of Japan's larger real-world robotics rollouts. In July 2023 Telexistence raised a $170 million Series B, with SoftBank Group and Foxconn's HH-CTBC Partnership joining existing backers including KDDI Open Innovation Fund and Airbus Ventures, bringing the company's total funding to roughly $210 million. The round supported both continued convenience-store rollout, including pilots with 7-Eleven using the newer TX GHOST robot, and expansion into logistics automation, such as a multi-arm system deployed at logistics company SENKO's Fukuoka facility. Beyond retail and logistics robots, Telexistence is developing Astra, a humanoid robot intended for broader in-store tasks with a target deployment window later this decade, and has launched Motion Data Factory, a service selling the real-world manipulation datasets its robots generate to other robotics teams.

Founded

2017

Headquarters

Minato-ku, Japan

Sector

robotics