Meet Abi, a robot designed by Grace Brown – and your new best friend

Note: This article was originally published on Women's Agenda.

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Gen Z mechatronics engineer and entrepreneur Grace Brown has closed a $3 million seed round led by Purpose Ventures for her robotics and AI startup, Andromeda.

The 24-year-old secured the deal from the venture capital fund last Friday, which will help her scale the nation-wide rollout of Andromeda’s humanoid companion robot, Abi.

“It’s absolutely exhilarating,” Brown told Women’s Agenda. “It’s definitely going to be a new chapter for our business.

“I think up until this fundraise, we’ve been you’re very stereotypical startup – very scrappy, very lean, having to make do with what we have.

“Now with this fundraise, it’s going to enable us to do so much more.”

Andromeda aims to provide better patient outcomes in Australia’s healthcare sector through Abi, a robot designed to bring joy and companionship. Abi has already been successfully piloted in aged care facilities and in children’s hospitals, completing daily tasks for patients, providing social and cognitive support and boosting the well-being, quality of life and independence of patients.

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“Abi is your best friend right out of the box,” Brown said.

“We’ve put a lot of emphasis on building her personality. That’s an approach that no other company in this industry has really taken – they are all generally quite focused on the utility of robotic technology, whereas we’re so much more focused on empathy and building connection with people.”

Brown came up with the idea of Abi during the COVID-19 pandemic. Feeling isolated during several strict lockdowns in Melbourne, Brown took on a project to build a robot – simply something to talk to, and perhaps something to give her a hug.

But she never expected Abi to grow into what she is now: her own person, with her own personality.

“She’s about 120 centimetres tall, she’s very bright and colourful, she’s very inquisitive, very curious, very sassy,” Brown said.

“I think science fiction has really painted this terrifying, Terminator-esque vision for robotics, but Abi is inspired by characters from Disney and Pixar.”

Abi has given people in aged care facilities and children’s hospitals some pretty special moments already.

“One time, at the Melbourne Children’s Hospital, there were about a dozen kids below the age of seven who had lined up just to give Abi a hug,” Brown said. “That was definitely one of my favourite moments.”
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Cameron McPherson is the CEO of the Medical and Aged Care Group, a family-owned residential care provider in Victoria. Andromeda’s humanoid robot Abi was rolled out across residential homes owned by the Medical and Aged Care Group, and McPherson said the trial was well received.

“We are always looking for ways to improve the care for our residents and we reached out to Grace having seen the possibility of Abi on a news article which led to trialling a few ‘Abi’s’ within some of our homes,” McPherson said.

“We have been so impressed with the feedback from our residents and the positive impact Abi has had that we are now putting more Abi’s across our homes and working in collaboration with Andromeda to provide feedback on their future development.”

Startup funding: what’s next for Andromeda

Whilst many believe robotic technology can only be imported to Australia from locations overseas, Abi is designed and manufactured entirely at Andromeda’s headquarters in Melbourne. The $3 million investment from Purpose Ventures, a $46 million fund headquartered in Perth, Western Australia, will help Brown expand the team at Andromeda, move to larger manufacturing facilities and increase the utility of Abi.

In two weeks’ time, Brown and the team at Andromeda are moving from a “squishy” startup hub into their very own 500 square metre warehouse in South Melbourne.

“One of our goals is to have 100 Abi’s out there in the next 18 months,” Brown said.

Andromeda is one of the very few female-founded startups in Australia that receive backing from venture capital funds. In 2023, according to figures from the State of Australian Start-up Funding Report, startups founded by women secured just four per cent of the $3.5 billion in startup funding in Australia, with all-male teams taking the vast majority of the 413 investment deals done.

Purpose Ventures Managing Director Derek Gerrard said Andromeda has the potential to be a “global leader” in STEM.

“When we first met Grace it was clear that she was an ambitious founder chasing her life’s work and this same passion is clearly shared across the rest of the team,” Gerrard said.

“There’s no doubt we are in a fast-growing era of robotic and AI opportunities, but the focus that Andromeda has on solving companionship, loneliness and utility within the health sector sets them apart.

“They have an opportunity to be a global leader in the interaction between social science and technology within the robotics sector, so we are excited to be on the journey with them as one of their investment partners.”