Rent a robot for $18 an hour?

The new robot warehouse worker from Tutor Intelligence, a Watertown startup, won't work for minimum wage.

But pay it $18 an hour, and it will uncomplainingly pick up boxes and plunk them onto wooden pallets — three shifts a day, with no breaks.

Tutor , founded by two MIT alums, is announcing this week that it has raised $34 million in venture capital funding.

Tutor is one of a handful of companies offering what some call "robots as a service." Similar to cloud-based software that you pay for by the month, rather than buy outright, these devices are paid for based on usage, to limit upfront costs.

The company was founded in 2021. Josh Gruenstein, co-founder and CEO, said the concept was to deploy robots that could "do real jobs that are economically useful," while also learning and gathering data to help the company develop future generations of robots that will perform other work in factories. Gruenstein refers to it as building a "central robot intelligence."

Tutor's robots are already deployed "coast to coast," Gruenstein said, but he didn't want to disclose any specific number of robots already on the job, or specific customer names. The robot can lift boxes weighing up to 42 pounds and can pick up and place 14 boxes per minute. It uses an array of suction cups to grip each box.

A human worker "stacking those for a full eight-hour shift," Gruenstein said, is going to "get real tired and risk real injury." And, he added, "those are the highest turnover roles in these factories."

Still, many unions are concerned about the increasing use of supply chain automation and its impact on workers. A 2024 dockworkers' strike in the U.S. centered on that issue.

Massachusetts has long been a center of activity for companies building warehouse robots, including Locus Robotics, Pickle Robot Company and RightHand Robotics. Amazon Robotics, which designs and builds robots that help run the e-commerce company's warehouses, grew out of the 2012 acquisition of another Massachusetts startup, Kiva Systems.

Despite that track record, Tutor's latest round of funding was led by Union Square Ventures, a Manhattan firm. The other key investors in this latest round are also from outside the state. Why aren't Massachusetts investors backing a hometown startup?

"Robotics has been a challenging industry, with low expectations, very long cycles to commercialize, massive [capital expenditure] investment in order to generate revenue and real-world value for customers," Gruenstein said. "You do need very specialized investors who are willing to underwrite that [kind] of risk." Tutor has 50 employees and is actively hiring. This latest funding round brings the company's total amount raised to $42 million.