Vecna Robotics Closes Series C-1 Round for Case-Picking Warehouse Robots
Investors continue to prove out their interest in letting robots do the heavy lifting in warehouses—literally.
Vecna Robotics, the Waltham, Mass.-based startup, announced Thursday it has raised $35 million in a Series C-1 round, which it started raising in March of 2022.
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That Series C-1 comes on the heels of the $65 million Series C round the company announced in January 2022, bringing the total Series C raise to $100 million. Tiger Global Management, Proficio Capital Partners and Impulse participated in the round.
The company plans to use the funds to bolster a new type of robot it plans to bring to market in early 2025. Currently, the robots as a service (RaaS) company offers its clients robots that can move full pallets. However, the robots coming out in 2025 will be able to case pick, allowing companies to build rainbow pallets.
That means that, when companies don’t want to ship one full pallet of the same item, they can add multiple different items to the same pallet. Right now, that process is typically done manually, Mike Bearman, chief customer officer at Vecna, said.
“The traditional case pick is there’s a person riding on a pallet truck, and they’ll jump on, drive it to the first location, pick what’s needed from that location, then drive it to the next location,” he said. “They’re really just building one pallet at a time…and because of that, it’s highly inefficient.”
With Vecna’s upcoming technology, though, robots will be able to pick the products for humans to manually arrange on the rainbow pallet, saving humans the extra step of driving—or walking—around the warehouse to grab the goods needed to build out the pallet.
Vecna is trialing the robots with its logistics client Geodis, and Mike Bearman, the robotics’ company’s chief customer officer, said the progress—particularly in terms of ROI and throughput—has been steady.
“Our initial trial with Geodis continues and has experienced massive throughput gains of almost 100 percent. We are working [on] projects right now through our limited availability program, and [ROI] projections are huge,” he told Sourcing Journal.
Geodis has 12 case-picking robots in its trial warehouse, with between two and four humans supporting the robots’ work and building rainbow pallets.
Bearman noted that Vecna’s partnership with another “top-tier 3PL” company has yielded strong projections for ROI. Vecna believes that client will see 38 percent ROI through 80 percent improvement in throughput, though the data has yet to be validated.