Collaborative Robotics Proxie: What It Is, Price, Gen 2

What Is Proxie, And Who Makes It?

Proxie is the flagship robot from Collaborative Robotics Inc., a startup that markets itself under the shorter name Cobot. The company was founded in 2022 by Brad Porter, who previously spent years at Amazon as VP and Distinguished Engineer overseeing robotics across the company's global logistics network, and who also served as CTO of Scale AI.

Proxie is built to move and handle materials indoors — think hospital supply carts, warehouse totes, and lab samples — while working safely alongside people rather than being fenced off like a traditional industrial arm. Cobot's pitch is a robot for environments too unstructured for classic warehouse automation but too physically demanding to leave entirely to people.

This page covers what Proxie actually does, its Gen 2 hardware, who is using it, what it costs, and how it compares to other cobots and mobile robots we track.

How Proxie Works: Base, Sensors, And Gen 2 Arms

The original Proxie rides on a holonomic base using four swerve-drive wheel modules, letting it move sideways and rotate in place inside tight hospital corridors and warehouse aisles rather than needing to turn like a car. It carries a stack of sensors for navigation and situational awareness so it can share space with people and equipment without dedicated robot-only lanes.

Cobot introduced Proxie Gen 2 at Automate 2026 in Chicago, adding a bimanual configuration — two arms instead of the mobile-cart-only first generation — aimed at two-handed tasks like hospital resupply, warehouse kitting, lab operations, and manufacturing line tending. Cobot has said Gen 2 builds directly on data from the first-generation fleet's real operating hours.

Proxie sits in the same collaborative-robot category we cover in our cobots hub and our cobot vs. robot explainer. If you want the broader category context before this specific robot, start there.

• Holonomic base with four swerve-drive modules for omnidirectional movement.
• Gen 2 adds two arms for bimanual, human-scale manipulation tasks.
• Designed to operate around people without full safety fencing.
• Built for indoor material handling: hospitals, labs, warehouses, factories.

Real Deployments: Who Is Using Proxie

Cobot names Maersk, Mayo Clinic, Moderna, Owens & Minor, and Tampa General Hospital among its customers, spanning logistics, life sciences, and healthcare — a deliberately varied set meant to prove Proxie generalizes across industries rather than being a single-vertical product.

By Cobot's own account, the first-generation fleet logged over 12,600 operating hours in production settings, moved more than 40 million pounds of material, and eliminated over 17 million walking steps for staff over roughly two years. Those are the company's self-reported figures, not independently audited, but they indicate the robots have been running in real facilities rather than only in demos.

That mix of hospital and industrial customers is unusual — most cobots on the market target a single niche. For comparison, see how a purpose-built industrial cobot is used in our cobot welding guide and our cobot palletizer explainer.

Proxie Price And How Cobot Sells It

Collaborative Robotics has not published a public retail price for Proxie. Like most enterprise mobile-manipulator deployments, Cobot sells through direct enterprise contracts and pilots rather than a listed sticker price or online checkout, so any number you see attributed to "the Proxie price" is an estimate or a leaked figure, not an official rate card.

This is standard for the category: enterprise material-handling robots are typically priced per fleet, per site, or as a service, factoring in integration, support, and volume rather than a single unit price. If you're comparing what collaborative robots generally cost across the market, our cobot cost guide breaks down typical price ranges by robot class.

If your organization is evaluating Proxie, expect a sales conversation and a pilot program rather than a self-serve purchase — that is how Cobot's existing hospital and logistics customers came on board.

Funding And Company Background

Collaborative Robotics raised a $100 million Series B in April 2024, led by General Catalyst with participation from Bison Ventures, Industry Ventures, and Lux Capital, alongside existing investors Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, Mayo Clinic, Neo, 1984 Ventures, MVP Ventures, and Calibrate Ventures. That round brought the company's total raised to more than $140 million in under two years from founding.

The investor list is notable for including Mayo Clinic, a strategic healthcare investor and now also a named customer — a pattern that shows up elsewhere in robotics, where a large potential buyer takes an equity stake alongside a commercial deployment.

Cobot has stayed relatively quiet on funding since the 2024 round, focusing public announcements on product (the Gen 2 launch) and customer deployments rather than new capital raises as of mid-2026.

How Proxie Compares To Other Cobots

Most cobots on the market are fixed-base arms bolted to a workstation for tasks like welding or palletizing — see our Fanuc cobot overview for that more traditional category. Proxie is different: it is a mobile manipulator that moves through a facility rather than staying at one station, closer to a warehouse AMR (autonomous mobile robot) with arms attached.

For the broader question of when a business needs a mobile robot versus a fixed cobot arm versus a traditional industrial robot, our industrial robot vs. cobot comparison and top cobots buying guide cover the tradeoffs in more general terms.

Proxie's real differentiator is breadth of deployment — hospitals and warehouses and labs — rather than raw specs. Whether that generalist approach beats a narrower, purpose-built robot for any one task is the open question worth watching as Gen 2 rolls out.