Calgary-based Attabotics, which makes warehouse automation robots, raised a $71.7M Series C-1 led by Export Development Canada, bringing total funding to $165M (Josh Scott/BetaKit)

Meagan Simpson / BetaKit:
Ontario-based Avidbots, which makes autonomous floor cleaning robots for commercial settings, raised a $70M Series C, bringing its total funding to $107M  —  Kitchener-Waterloo startup Avidbots has secured $70 million USD in a Series C funding round to expand its fleet of floor scrubbing robots.

Meagan Simpson / BetaKit:
NFT startup Dapper Labs, the company behind CryptoKitties, confirms it laid off ~134 employees or 22% of its workforce; Dapper Labs raised $600M to date  —  Vancouver tech startups Dapper and Hootsuite both made layoffs this week.  —  Dapper Labs has laid off around 22 percent of its staff, BetaKit has learned.

Charles Mandel / BetaKit:
Goldsky, a crypto infrastructure startup helping companies aggregate and process on-chain data, raised a $20M seed led by Felicis Ventures and Dragonfly Capital  —  Goldsky is living up to its lux name, announcing a $20 million seed round less than a year after the startup’s founding in 2021.

Kathryn Tewson / Techdirt:
Hands-on with DoNotPay, a service claiming to be the first robot lawyer: slow, drafted a terrible defamation demand letter, missed legal issues, and more  —  Note: This post is an adaptation of what started initially as a Twitter thread.  —  I’ve been going pretty hard on DoNotPay …

Brian Heater / TechCrunch:
Massachussets-based warehouse robotics startup Locus raised a $117M Series F at a “close to” $2B valuation, following a $150M Series E in February 2021  —  The last few years have been a major accelerator for the robotics industry at large, but warehouse robotics may be the biggest winner of all.

Annie Palmer / CNBC:
Amazon increases its average starting pay for front-line US staff to $19+/hour, up from $18/hour; warehouse and delivery workers will earn $16/hour to $26/hour  —  – Amazon is bumping its average starting pay for warehouse and delivery workers to more than $19 an hour, up from $18 an hour, the company said Wednesday.