LG Electronics takes 51% of Bear Robotics and hands it the CLOi service robot business, four weeks after Samsung moved on Rainbow

LG Electronics has taken control of Bear Robotics, the Silicon Valley maker of indoor delivery robots, after its board voted on 22 January to exercise a call option over a further 30% of the start-up. The purchase lifts LG's holding to 51% and turns Bear into a subsidiary, the Seoul-based group said on 24 January 2025.

LG first bought into Bear in March 2024, when it paid $60 million for a 21% stake under a stock purchase agreement and negotiated the right to buy up to another 30%. Neither company has disclosed the price of the second tranche, and LG gave no valuation for Bear in its announcement. At the March 2024 price, LG's first payment implied a value of roughly $285.7 million for the whole company, a reference point only, since option terms are often set differently.

The deal changes how LG organises its robot effort. LG said its commercial robot business, built around the LG CLOi range of guide, delivery and service machines, will be transferred to Bear, with John Ha remaining chief executive and his management team staying in place. Home robots and factory robots stay inside LG, and the group said it wants a single software platform that runs commercial, industrial and household machines alike.

Bear was founded in 2017 and sells AI-driven robots that carry food and goods inside restaurants and other buildings in the United States, South Korea and Japan. LG singled out the start-up's software as the asset it wanted: building service robots into a platform, coordinating many robots at once and supervising fleets from the cloud. Ha was previously a senior software engineer and technical lead at Google, according to LG's 2024 announcement. Bear raised $81 million in a Series B round in March 2022.

LG's own robot history goes back to 2017, when it placed guide robots at Incheon International Airport, and it later added delivery and disinfection models, according to the company. It assembles robots at LG Future Park in Gumi. When it first invested in Bear, LG argued that robots needed a standard, open software layer in the way Android served smartphones, and cited projections that the global service robot market would grow from $36.2 billion in 2021 to $103.3 billion in 2026.

The timing is pointed. On 31 December 2024 Samsung Electronics said it would exercise its own call option in Rainbow Robotics, the KAIST humanoid spin-off, raising its holding from 14.7% to 35% to become the largest shareholder and consolidate the company. Samsung had paid 86.8 billion won for the first 14.7% in 2023. Korea's two largest electronics makers have now used the same two-step route, a minority stake with an option to take control, to buy a robot business rather than build one from scratch.

In restaurant and hospitality delivery, Bear is up against Chinese makers that have raised more. Keenon Robotics closed a $200 million Series D led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 in September 2021, and Pudu Robotics has raised a series of Series C extensions, the latest in May 2023 for an undisclosed sum. In the United States, Serve Robotics, which runs sidewalk delivery robots, announced an $80 million registered direct offering on 7 January 2025, and Starship Technologies raised $90 million in February 2024.

LG paired the deal with a wider robot plan. At CES 2025 chief executive William Cho said robots were a certain future, and the group described a home hub robot, project name Q9, due out in 2025, that combines voice, sound and image recognition with self-driving and uses Microsoft speech technology, plus a software development kit for outside developers. On the factory side, LG's Production Engineering Research Institute is developing an autonomous vertical articulated robot that uses cameras, radar and lidar to move material, assemble and inspect parts. LG said it is working with Robostar on industrial robots and with Robotis on actuators, and aims to grow its smart factory solutions business to trillion-won scale by 2030.

The technical case rests on fleet software rather than hardware. A wheeled delivery robot that follows a fixed route is now cheap to build; the harder work is routing dozens of machines through a crowded dining room, splitting jobs between them and letting one operator watch a whole site remotely. LG said it would sell the combined line through its B2B network and bundle robots with hotel TVs, digital signage and IT equipment as turnkey packages.

Several questions remain open. LG has not disclosed Bear's revenue, fleet size or the cost of the option, so investors cannot judge what control cost. Folding a large company's robot division into a start-up of about eight years risks culture and product overlap between CLOi and Bear's own robots. And the restaurant robot segment is crowded with lower-priced Chinese competitors.

The next markers are LG's first-quarter 2025 results, the first in which Bear will appear as a subsidiary, the promised 2025 launch of the Q9 home robot, and evidence that a common software platform is shipping across commercial and factory robots before LG's 2030 smart factory deadline.