Cambridge, Mass. based Pickle Robot, a developer of “Physical AI” delivering robotic automation systems that unload trucks, announced it has raised $50 million in Series B funding with participation from a strategic customer, Teradyne Robotics Ventures, Toyota Ventures, Ranpak, Third Kind Venture Capital, One Madison Group, Hyperplane, Catapult Ventures and others.
Additionally, Pickle announced that it received orders from six customers in the third quarter of 2024 for over 30 production robots. The company expects these robots to deploy in the first half of 2025.
Funding will be used on current, new technology
The new orders include pilot conversions, existing customer expansions and new customer adoption. The funding will accelerate the development of new feature sets and build out the company’s commercial teams to unlock new markets and geographies for global robotic truck unloading customers.
“Pickle Robot customers are experiencing the value of Physical AI applied to a common logistics process that challenges thousands of operations every day,” said AJ Meyer, CEO and founder of Pickle Robot. “The new funding and our strategic customer relationships enable Pickle to chart the future of supply chain robotics, rapidly expand our core product capabilities, and grow our business to deliver tremendous customer value now and in the future.”
Pickle Robot says it is laser-focused on applying its Physical AI technology to one of the most labor-intensive, physically demanding and highest turnover work areas in logistics operations: truck unloading.
Pickle’s Physical AI combines a powerful vision system with generative AI foundation models trained on millions of data points from real logistics and warehouse operations to enable Pickle’s robotic hardware platform to perform physical work at a human-scale or better.
“Pickle is hitting its strides delivering innovation, development, commercial traction, and customer satisfaction,” said Omar Asali, Pickle Robot board member and CEO of Ranpak. “The company is building groundbreaking technology while executing on essential recurring parts of a successful business-like field service and manufacturing management. It is a testament to the strong team at Pickle that world-class customers want to work with them and that investors are excited about their trajectory.”
Pickle Unload Systems have been operating at production capacity in distribution centers for multiple customers since the summer of 2023. Pickle robots work collaboratively with warehouse staff to make the physically demanding process of unloading non-palletized goods from trucks and containers safer and more efficient.
Pickle Robot says it is on a mission to automate inbound and outbound processes at 1 million warehouse doors over the next 10 years. To date, Pickle Robots have unloaded over 10 million pounds of merchandise from import containers and domestic floor-loaded trailers for customers that distribute footwear, apparel, power tools, toys, kitchenware, packaging materials, small appliances and other general merchandise. Going forward, the product roadmap is expanding to service parcel-type freight.
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