The French startup is back for this year’s show (insofar as anyone is really back for the show), with some key updates to its robot, Reachy. After all, a humanoid robot will do that on the show floor (even if it’s only half of one). “We’re not trying to triple headcount in the next year, but we are hiring.Pollen Robotics turned heads at last year’s CES. “Our robust due diligence process showed that Nimble has a clear technology lead on the incumbents and has an extraordinary opportunity to be the next generation leader in the industry.”Īs with the growth of its warehouses, Nimble is taking a measured approach toward adding to its 100 or so person headcount. “With E-commerce and warehouse automation continuing to exhibit incredible growth, we were attracted to Nimble’s industry leading AI robotic technology and 3PL fulfillment capabilities,” Cedar Pines’ Stephen Weiss said in a release tied to the news. Nimble isn’t quite ready to talk valuation just yet. That follows a $50 million Series A almost exactly too years ago, bringing its total funding up to around $110 million. The startup’s growth is being fueled, in part by a $65 million Series B led by Cedar Pine that also features DNS Capital, GSR Ventures and Breyer Capital. Nimble will continue to support existing clients, but the launch of these robotic fulfillment finds it largely moving away from its previous model of retrofitting existing warehouses. Again, let’s say somewhere between Walmart and your cousin’s eBay store. In the meantime, Nimble is focusing on mid-market retailers - though it won’t disclose the names of any of those clients. The eventual goal is to work with a wide range of different company sizes, from enterprise to Etsy seller (his own hypothetical was Shopify merchants, but I prefer the alliteration), and the ability to serve multiple clients in a single factory should help. Kalouche says the company is taking a controlled, deliberate approach to the number of warehouses. The decentralized nature of the fulfillment center goes a long way toward speeding up delivery by bringing products close to customers. But the picking is an automated function.” We’re still working toward that, but we’re not there yet. “Our goal is to work toward the dark warehouse. “There are still manual operations,” he says. Kalouche notes that it hasn’t yet achieved a fully lights out factory just yet. Nimble’s advantage is the prevalence of autonomous systems. That’s the promise of third-party warehouse automation writ large - though Amazon has its own growing army of robots. While it’s not same-day, it takes online retailers a step closer to the thing they most want these days - something that can help somewhat level the playing field against Amazon’s 800-pound gorilla. population coverage in one-two days and click-to-collect savings of up to 40% compared to legacy 3PL providers.” Nimble’s network of robotic warehouses will provide brands 96%+ U.S. I its press material, the company explains that its “intelligent robotic fulfillment systems will autonomously pick, pack and ship e-commerce orders while reducing warehouse size by up to 75%. He won’t disclose how many are currently online, only that the figure is “between one and 10” and the locations are geographically dispersed across the U.S. Kalouche says the company has already begun operating its own third-party fulfillment centers, quietly opening the first roughly a year ago. When you automate the picking step, you remove all of those constraints.” You need to make warehouses ergonomic, safe and OSHA compliant for people. Until you automate picking, you need people in the warehouse. “I’ve been in hundreds of warehouses now, and as I went to more and more, I learned that everyone’s automating almost all the pieces of the warehouse, but picking is still the hardest part. “It evolved as we learned about the industry,” he tells TechCrunch. It’s a method that lets companies effectively outsource their warehousing needs through fully automated third-party logistics (3PL) factories.įounder and CEO Simon Kalouche says that Nimble’s new model wasn’t the goal when the pick and pack robotic automation firm launched in 2017. This morning, Nimble is announcing plans its own third-way compromise. Most people ultimately land on some combination of these approaches. Many firms looking to automate their warehouses simply don’t have the resources to effectively start from scratch. Brownfield proponents, on the other hand, point to the time and money required for a full rebuild. On one side stand the greenfield folk, who insist that the best possible experience is one built from the ground up, with these automated systems at its core. There’s a long-standing debate in the world of logistics robotics.
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