warehouse picking robots
Robotics are playing a growing role in the world of e-commerce logistics and fulfillment — where they are seen not just as a way to speed up operations but to drastically reduce the costs of running them — and today a startup developing software and hardware specifically in the area of robot picking is announcing some funding.
Nomagic, a Polish startup that has built a robotic arm that can identify and pick out an item from an unordered selection (say, from objects in a box) and then move or pack it into another place, has raised $22 million, funding that it will be using toward both growing and expanding its business.
Nomagic’s robotic arms were first deployed to work picking up and moving small consumer electronics and related items — phones, cables, small toys — before extending to items like bagged apparel. Kacper Nowicki, the CEO who co-founded the company with Marek Cygan (CTO) and Tristan d’Orgeval (CSO), said the plan is to add more categories like groceries over time, reflecting changing consumer habits and what people are buying online these days. “That is the long-term goal,” he said.
The company already has a number of customers in sectors ranging from fashion, e-commerce and third-party logistics providers — one of the more prominent is Brack.ch, a Swiss-based “everything” store similar to Amazon in terms of its physical product range. And while it currently bases its tech around computer vision to identify objects and read codes, over time it is likely also to incorporate other kinds of tech, such as radio-wave scanning to identify items.
Khosla Ventures and Berlin’s Almaz Capital co-led the round with the European Investment Bank, with past backers Hoxton Ventures, Capnamic Ventures, DN Capital and Manta Ray also participating.
Nomagic last raised funding — a seed round of $8.6 million — in February 2020; and in the interim, it’s been a wild ride in the world of e-commerce.
COVID-19 led to a huge surge in online shopping, but also a reassessment of how people could work in warehouses under pandemic concerns and restrictions, and in some cases some serious reassessments of how operations were run, and a curtailing of investments to adjust to changing (and sometimes hard-hit) business conditions. Nomagic’s technology plays into all of those developments in a variety of ways.
warehouse picking robots
