Nimble Robotics raises $65 million in Series B round, launches robotic 3PL service

Nimble Robotics, an autonomous logistics and AI robotics company, announced today that it has raised $65 million in a Series B financing round led by Cedar Pine, with participation from existing investors DNS Capital, GSR Ventures, and Breyer Capital, among others. The additional funds bring total capital raised to $115 million.

Building on five years of experience in robotic ecommerce fulfillment, the company added that the fresh capital will further its goal of building a nationwide network of next-generation autonomous 3PL fulfillment centers. To scale its robotic 3PL fulfillment service, Nimble has assembled a team of executives who have scaled logistics operations at Amazon. Nimble added that the team building its technological advancements include engineers from NASA, SpaceX, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, GoogleX as well as Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and MIT.

Nimble explained that its robotic fulfillment systems will autonomously pick, pack and ship ecommerce orders while reducing warehouse size by up to 75%. Nimble’s network of robotic warehouses will provide brands 96%+ U.S. population coverage in 1-2 days, the company added.

“Finding and retaining warehouse labor, while meeting a 2-day delivery standard, is our customer’s number one operational problem” said Nimble’s founder and CEO Simon Kalouche. “Brands want to leverage robotics and automation solutions to address this issue but are often challenged by the economics. Our autonomous fulfillment centers and 3PL service will give brands access to state-of-the-art robotic fulfillment systems in a cost-effective way without large upfront investment.

“Many companies are working to incrementally automate the warehouse,” Kalouche continued. “They’re taking legacy old-school warehouse concepts that were designed around the ergonomics, safety and productivity of people and trying to automate each manual process one step at a time. We believe that approach leads to a suboptimal solution design – one with marginal gains and very high integration costs which ultimately dilutes the ROI. At Nimble, we’ve built intelligent robots that automate the hardest manual task in the warehouse, the unit-picking and packing process. Rather than inefficiently retrofitting warehouses that were designed for people, we’re completely reimagining and reinventing the warehouse to be conducive to robots – where robots can go and what robots can do. This first-principles approach unlocks a completely new type of autonomous warehouse that’s simpler, smaller, faster and more efficient than the best warehouses in the world today.”

“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,” said Stephen Weiss of Cedar Pine LLC.. “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.”