UPDATED 01:14 EDT / JUNE 09 2017

EMERGING TECH

SoftBank buys robotics startups Boston Dynamics and Schaft from Alphabet

Japanese technology giant SoftBank Group Corp. said Thursday it has acquired Boston Dynamics from Google Inc.’s parent company Alphabet Inc., ending months of uncertainty about the robotics firm and its sometimes creepy walking machines.

SoftBank said the deal also includes a second, more secretive robotics company called Schaft, which was acquired by Google from its Japanese founders in 2013.

Google has reportedly been looking to offload Boston Dynamics for over a year, due to an apparent conflict of interest between the two. Reports last year suggested there was growing tension between Alphabet’s executives, who wanted to get a commercial product to market, and Boston Dynamic’s engineers, who requested more freedom to build its cool-but-freaky robots without worrying about making a profit at the same time.

Luckily for Boston Dynamics, it just so happens that robots are massively popular in Japan, which has long been seen as a leader in the field. Given SoftBank’s stated ambition of becoming the world’s most valuable company within the next 300 years, it becomes clearer why it’s willing to make this bet.

“Today, there are many issues we still cannot solve by ourselves with human capabilities,” Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive officer of SoftBank, said in a statement. “Smart robotics are going to be a key driver of the next stage of the Information Revolution, and Marc and his team at Boston Dynamics are the clear technology leaders in advanced dynamic robots.”

SoftBank has been throwing a silly amount of money around in recent months in pursuit of its goals, including taking a $4 billion stake in chip maker Nvidia Corp. and its $24 billion acquisition of ARM Holdings Plc. Last month, the company also announced it had raised $93 billion toward a $100 billion fund it plans to use to invest in technology startups.

Boston Dynamics is probably the best-known robotics company in the world, thanks to its popular series of YouTube videos showing terrifyingly cool humanoid and dog-like robots running around, opening doors and jumping back up after being pushed over.

“We at Boston Dynamics are excited to be part of SoftBank’s bold vision and its position creating the next technology revolution, and we share SoftBank’s belief that advances in technology should be for the benefit of humanity,” Marc Raibert, founder and CEO of Boston Dynamics, said in a statement.

As for Schaft, the other robotics firm SoftBank has acquired, there’s scant information available. The company was one of a group of seven startups Google acquired back in 2013 for an undisclosed amount. It was founded in 2012 by Yuto Nakanishi, Junichi Urata, Narito Suzuki and Koichi Nishiwaki after being incubated at the the JSK Robotics Laboratory at the University of Tokyo.

As for what it’s working on right now, however, that remains a mystery. Schaft no longer even has a website up and running, and its only YouTube video clip is more than three years old.

Image: Boston Dynamics

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