When Matthew Anderson was eight years old, he was already building robots and hacking electronics. By the time he founded A&K Robotics in 2015, he had spent a decade helping companies raise capital — from local food ventures to a Fortune 200. The through line was never the money. It was the question of who gets to move through the world freely.
In April, Anderson's company closed an $8 million CAD Series A to answer that question at scale. The round, co-led by BDC Capital's Industrial Innovation Venture Fund and Vantage Futures, backs A&K's Cruz autonomous mobility pods — self-driving vehicles already operating at Vancouver International Airport and Madrid-Barajas, moving passengers through some of the busiest terminals on earth.
Cruz pods look like compact airport shuttles without the driver. They navigate using cameras, sonar, and LiDAR, running on A&K's proprietary Kinesos AI platform. But the hard part is not the hardware.
"If you can solve mobility in a crowded airport, you can solve it almost anywhere," Anderson says.
Most autonomous vehicles are designed for roads — structured environments with lanes, signs, and predictable rules. Airports are the opposite. Passengers walk in every direction. Luggage blocks pathways. Gate changes send hundreds of people moving at once. Cruz was built for that chaos. Its AI reads crowd flow and moves with it rather than fighting it.
Roughly 17% of the global population lives with mobility challenges. Airport assistance requests are growing 10–15% annually — outpacing passenger growth. Traditional employee-driven cart services cannot scale at that rate.
A&K is now moving from pilots to permanent infrastructure. The new funding will expand production from dozens to hundreds of units per year at a third facility in Surrey, British Columbia, and accelerate R&D at a new rapid-prototyping lab. The company's board now includes Melonee Wise, a robotics industry veteran who previously led deployments at Fetch Robotics.
Aging populations, surging air travel, and persistent labor shortages in aviation are creating demand that autonomous systems can meet. A&K's bet is that the company that solves indoor mobility in the hardest environment — a crowded airport — will own the category everywhere else.
From pilot to infrastructure
The Series A supports three priorities: manufacturing scale, geographic expansion, and talent. A&K plans to grow its presence across North America and Europe, building on deployments at YVR and Madrid-Barajas. The investor syndicate — BDC Capital, Vantage Futures, RiSC Capital, Grep VC, Nimbus Synergies, and serial entrepreneur Dan Gelbart — brings both capital and operational expertise in airport infrastructure and industrial robotics.
"We're bringing autonomy indoors," says Jessica Yip, COO and co-founder of A&K. "While others focus on roads, we're tackling the harder problem — navigating dense, unpredictable crowds."
The technology is proven in production. What comes next is scaling it from a pilot story to infrastructure.