Watney raises $80M Series A for robots that maintain data centres

Watney, a US startup building dual-arm robots that do maintenance work inside data centres, announced on September 17, 2026 that it has raised an $80 million Series A co-led by the Valor Atreides AI Fund and Hummingbird Ventures. The round takes its total funding past $100 million.

Conviction, Abstract, A* and Grant Gordon also took part, according to the company. Watney was co-founded by Ryan Gannon and Sean Cheong; Dealroom dates the company to 2023. No valuation was disclosed.

What do Watney’s robots do?

Watney builds dexterous, two-armed robots for routine physical work in server halls, such as cable management and restarting servers. In its funding announcement the company says it has served “major hyperscalers” since 2025 and runs “the largest fleet of dexterous robots running 24/7/365 across the United States”, with more than 99.99% reliability across hundreds of thousands of operational hours. Those are company claims; Watney did not name customers or disclose fleet size.

Is Meta using Watney robots?

Meta is testing them. WIRED reported in late August 2026, citing current and former Meta workers, that two dual-armed Watney robots have been on trial since June 2025 at Meta’s Altoona, Iowa campus and its Prometheus data centre in New Albany, Ohio, working on network-cable swaps. According to that reporting, the robots were slower than human technicians and ran under supervision. Meta is also testing a Kinova Gen3 arm for power-cycling servers and ABB machines for reseating components. One worker told WIRED that a working cable-swap system could eventually remove up to 80% of the workload in some roles.

Why are investors funding data-centre robots now?

Dealroom’s write-up of the round argues that the AI data-centre build-out is constrained less by chips than by skilled labour, and much of the upkeep is repetitive hands-on work at a rack. That makes data centres a relatively structured setting for manipulation robots: standard hardware, controlled climate, and tasks that can be specified precisely. Watney competes for the same jobs with industrial-arm suppliers such as Kinova and ABB and with start-ups including Exclaim Robotics and Shepherd Robotics, according to Dealroom, which notes that none has yet proven the model at scale, and a supervised pilot is still some distance from fleet-wide deployment. Meta’s tests reach beyond hands-on repair: WIRED also reported trials of autonomous machines for moving server racks and tracking inventory across several facilities.

Watney’s own framing avoids the humanoid pitch. Its announcement argues for robots built for precision, reliability and scale rather than for imitating human workers, and presents data-centre deployment speed as the first market for that approach.

Why it matters: an $80 million Series A for server-hall maintenance, backed by a live trial at Meta, puts AI infrastructure alongside factories and warehouses as a market for manipulation robots.