Grace Brown’s humanoid robotics company, Andromeda, has just secured a massive investment to further expand, in the largest Series A round led by a woman in Australia this year.

This deal comes at a much-needed time for diversity in the Australian startup ecosystem. Founding teams with at least one female founder received just 15 per cent of all private investment capital in 2024, and 2025 is currently on track to continue the trend of all-male founding teams dominating investment rounds.

Also unique about this deal, led by the US-based Forerunner Ventures, is that it is majority women-led, bringing together several female investors, including Eurie Kim (ŌURA Chairperson), Main Sequence’s Alezeia Brown, Rethink Impact’s Heidi Patel and Artesian’s Ananya Sinha.

Andromeda aims to help combat loneliness through emotionally intelligent humanoid companion robots.

It’s a bold and unique vision, and comes from an extraordinarily clever and creative co founder and CEO.

Grace Brown is a mechatronic engineer. She initially applied her skills to creating a companion for herself during Melbourne’s prolonged COVID-19 lockdowns, before seeing an opportunity for such humanoid robots to support key care-related industries.

Still in her mid-twenties, the entrepreneur only closed a $3 million seed round last year, led by Purpose Ventures. At the time, she told Women’s Agenda they had been operating as a stereotypically “scrappy and lean” startup and that, “Now with this fundraise, it’s going to enable us to do so much more.”

Already, the companionship offered by Andromeda’s “Abi” is so in demand that the company has a waitlist of orders for customers and partners in the aged care sector and in other industries. The first deployment of their next-generation Abi (Genesis Abi) will occur at a Mecwacare aged care home later this month. The latest upgrades to Abi make it the first humanoid robot ready to support Australia’s workforce.

Entrepreneur and CEO Grace Brown

This new funding will help Andromeda fast-track customers on that waitlist, while also expanding into the United States to initially pursue the aged care market.

Andromeda is also hiring across all areas of their business, including engineering and customer success. In the US, Brown says they’re hiring for creative and animation robotics specialists.

Brown shares what Genesis Abi can do by being fully autonomous.

“Care teams can direct Abi and set her daily schedule,” Brown says. “She’ll navigate the home independently, supporting staff to lead group activities, spending one-on-one time with residents, conversing in their preferred language, listening to their stories, and bringing that spark of human connection we all crave.

She adds that Abi will help support care teams to provide more companionship to residents, “filling a void that simply can’t be solved by more staff alone.”

Andromeda’s approach to robotics focuses on empathy and emotional intelligence. Working with co-founder Yan Chen, Brown led Andromeda through R&D into commercialisation and now expansion. At the heart of it all is their goal to leverage technology for addressing the loneliness epidemic.

“We believe the next mass technological adoption will be the home companion robot. With Abi, we’re leading that shift, starting in aged care where the need for meaningful connection is greatest,” said Brown.

“We’re at the frontier of emotion, character AI and social systems design, building a new kind of relationship that feels warm, helpful and profoundly human because the world needs more of that.”