Unbox Robotics, a supply chain robotics technology company, announced on Wednesday it has raised $7 million in a Series-A round led by 3one4 Capital, with participation from Sixth Sense Ventures and Redstart Labs (Info Edge).
The round also saw participation from Unbox Robotics’ founders Pramod Ghadge, Shahid Memon and its CPO Rohit Pitale, alongside existing investors — US-based venture capital firm SOSV, Arali Ventures, WEH Ventures, BEENEXT, Karthik Bhat’s Force Ventures, Dr Vijay Kedia (Kedia Securities), Aditya Singh (Stride Ventures) and Pavitar Singh (Sprinklr). Other investors who participated include Rahul Chaudhary (Treebo Hotels), Nikhil Vora and Kathan Shah (Sixth Sense Ventures), and Veda VC.
The company will use the funds primarily to expand the team across functions, fulfil customer demand internationally, on R&D and to expand to new geographies.
It has already onboarded some of the largest e-commerce and logistics enterprises as early adopters through trials or pilots and filed IP for its technology in India, the US and the EU, it said.
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Unbox Robotics specialises in robotics-based fulfilment and distribution technology for small to large e-commerce, retail and logistics enterprises.
Ghadge, the CEO of Unbox Robotics, said, “We are obsessed with improving the way packages are handled, distributed, and delivered to end-customers. We believe that there’s a massive potential for building and deploying robotics tech to deliver more packages using smaller footprints at lower operational costs, as we see more adoption of e-commerce and Q-commerce (quick commerce) across the globe.”
“Since we launched our beta pilots with leading third-party logistics and e-commerce players in April 2021, we have already got orders from s leading e-commerce logistics companies. We are on our way to converting every other pilot or demo into a commercial contract. We will deploy the funds to build an A+ team to help our customers experience the future of logistics, sorting and supply chain across continents,” added Ghadge.
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“Unbox Robotics takes a novel approach in technology development to crack some of the most critical concerns in customers’ supply chains. We are excited to build a diverse team and further develop outstanding robotics technology for the future of global supply chains,” said Memon, CTO of Unbox Robotics.
The company’s robotics solutions are built to consolidate customers’ orders in fulfilment centres, as well as sort them as per final delivery locations in distribution centres or delivery hubs.
“Its proprietary plug-and-play Swarm robotics can bring down the deployment time at locations to less than a week,” the company said.
Anurag Ramdasan, Partner, 3one4 Capital, said, “Globally, supply chain and logistics have been reshaped with the growth in e-commerce and D2C [direct-to-customer] over the last decade. Every layer of the stack today requires incredible optimisation and automation to service the growing demand.
“Unbox Robotics is doing amazing work in identifying and solving these high-value problems, and the team built by Pramod, Shahid and Rohit bring deep domain expertise to tackle this problem at scale.”
Nikhil Vora, Founder and CEO of Sixth Sense Ventures, said, “We believe the e-commerce and D2C boom is creating a large need for automation solutions within warehouses and FCs [fulfilment centres], with the industry slated to grow to $32 billion over the next two to three years. This coupled with evolving consumer expectations, labour shortage, omnichannel distribution, and technology accessibility has made robotics a priority for both e-commerce and fulfilment companies.”
“Unbox’s compact, vertical, and modular system is well suited for current market needs,” he added.