KITCHENER - Clearpath Robotics has raised $30 million US as it aggressively pursues the expanding market for self-driving vehicles that carry materials around factories and warehouses.

This is the second round of investment raised by the growing Kitchener technology company during the past 15 months. The last one was $11.2 million US in January 2015. This new round was led by iNovia Capital with participation from GE Ventures, Eclipse Ventures, RRE Ventures, Caterpillar Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank.

The funds will be used to expand the company's industrial division called Otto Motors. That division is focused on self-driving vehicles for moving materials and products around factories and warehouses.

Clearpath currently employs 155 people at its headquarters on Strasburg Road in South Kitchener. Two-and-a-half years ago the company employed 38 people.

It is hiring, and expects to grow to 300 employees within 18 months. It has about 50 positions that need to be filled right away. Almost all of the new hires will work in Clearpath's industrial division called Otto Motors. It is looking for engineers and non-technical people.

"We are trying to hire marketing people, sales people, operations people and creative in design and product," Matt Rendall, the chief executive officer and co-founder of Clearpath, said.

This region is great for engineering talent but not so much for the other skill sets that are needed by growing technology companies, he said.

Earlier this year Clearpath opened a secret testing site for its autonomous vehicles in a large building in Cambridge.

"We created a test factory where our vehicles can run 24-7/365," Rendall said.

In November it will open another site in North Waterloo on Randall Drive. The company's other robotic vehicles will developed at this new site.

During its first five years, Clearpath built remote-controlled and robotic vehicles for academic researchers and government scientists who collect samples and conduct tests in dangerous environments. It sold the vehicles in several sectors of the economy, including mining, the environment, aerospace, defence and agriculture.

But the market for autonomous vehicles that ferry supplies and materials around warehouses and factories is many times larger than any other sector of the economy that uses Clearpath's products.

The Otto is used by General Electric and John Deere, among others.

"To give you a perspective on the market opportunity, General Electric operates 400 manufacturing centres globally," Rendall said. "Each manufacturing centre represents several millions of dollars in automation opportunity for Otto."

The autonomous vehicles built by Clearpath are packed with leading-edge technology, and is comparable to Google's self-driving car, Rendall said.

"We have state-of-the-art electric vehicle technology in our self-driving vehicle."

Clearpath also developed a supercharger that quickly recharges the Otto's battery. There is a software platform that is used to dispatch the vehicles inside a factory or warehouse that Rendall likens to the Uber app.

"So it has been a significant amount of effort over the last 18 months," Rendall said.

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Otto was a top-secret project for three years at Clearpath, and it went public with the vehicle in January 2015 with its first round of investment.

"The whole intent of the dollars that we brought into the business was to commercialize the work we had been doing on our top-secret prototype," Rendall said.

Clearpath was founded by four graduates of the University of Waterloo's mechatronics engineering program - Rendall, Ryan Gariepy, Pat Martinson and Bryan Webb. They entered a contest sponsored by the U.S. military for a robotic vehicle that finds and removes landmines. That led to the development of Clearpath's first robotic vehicle. Today it has nine robotic vehicles.