Unbox Robotics raises $1.2 M in Pre-Series A round

2024-04-08 06:43:42 Business

525

Pune, India, April 23, 2021: Unbox Robotics, a logistics automation startup, today raised $1.2M as a part of their Pre-Series A round from BEENEXT, Karthik Bhat (Through his syndicate on AngelList India), Info Edge (India) Ltd. backed Redstart Labs (India) Ltd., WEH Ventures. Existing investors Arali Ventures, SOSV and HAX, and Entrepreneur First participated in the round along with Marquee Angel investors. This investment will primarily be used for scaling early client pilots, team expansion, and product improvements.

With retail and logistics companies increasingly looking to go the contact-less route fueled by the pandemic, the approach to warehouse management has seen a significant shift in the last year. Unbox aims to address the complex challenges faced by retail and logistics players when it comes to warehouse management in a sustainable manner. Unbox Robotics is built using a proprietary plug-and-play swarm robotics system that automates and improves package sorting as well as the order consolidation process while using optimum floor space and capital.

Hero Choudhary, Managing Partner, BEENEXT said, ?The Unbox team is striving to make automation easily available and accessible? using tech and big data. Their package sorting and order consolidation solution is bringing in multifold efficiencies for the logistic sector and next-gen companies across the globe. By reducing the warehouse area significantly, and enhancing efficiency in a short period, the company is paving the way to sustainable robotics.?

?Globally, e-commerce has seen rapid growth, but the logistics infrastructure empowering better customer experience has struggled to keep up. Unbox enables quick deployment, high throughput, and inherent flexibility for the rapidly evolving logistics market.? Duncan Turner, Managing Director, HAX, General Partner, SOSV

?The Unbox team has taken a customer-first approach to solve this problem and the early results are promising. We believe the founding team has the right mix of skills, ambition and intent to make a dent in this industry.? said, Rohit Krishna, General Partner, WEH Ventures.

?The Unbox team is bringing an interesting and novel approach to warehouse logistics that would hopefully lay the foundation for much more advances in this space.? said, Vibhore Sharma, Partner, Redstart Labs (India) Ltd.

?With a massive surge in e-commerce, in the next 3-5 years, the logistics industry needs to handle about 2X the load they process today. Additionally, with such increased demand, companies need more warehousing space, typically three times higher for online retailers than brick and mortar players. In such a situation, the industry needs flexible, compact, and on-demand sorting systems. However, existing sorting systems are difficult to scale up or down, require huge area, money & installation time. Having seen these problems first hand, we decided to build a plug & play swarm robotics system that can improve the package sorting productivity while saving the area by 50-70% compared to existing sorting systems. Currently, we are closely working with six e-commerce and logistics enterprises in India, Southeast Asia, and the US to deploy our solution in the next twelve months and earn seven-figure revenue figures.? said, Pramod Ghadge, CEO, Unbox Robotics

Unbox systems can bring down the deployment to less than a week compared to other solutions that can take up to 4 months or beyond. The product?s USP lies in its ability to reduce warehouse area by 50-70%, increasing personnel productivity by 3x, and reducing Capex by 40%.

About Unbox Robotics:

Unbox Robotics offers software-defined robotics solutions to enable logistics players to automate and radically improve their operations on-demand in a limited footprint and capital across the globe. Using proprietary Swarm Intelligence and ML algorithms inspired by nature, the company plans to redefine the way companies sort and ship orders. Unbox Robotics was formed at Entrepreneur First, a leading talent investor and VC fund which helps most ambitious people build technology startups from scratch. The team at Unbox Robotics consists of alumni from the National University of Singapore, the University of York, the Indian Institute of Technology, and the Indian School of Business with international experience in robotics, manufacturing, and logistics.

About BEENEXT:

BEENEXT is a Venture Capital fund managed by serial entrepreneurs that focuses on assisting founders with its operational experience, network, trust, unique perspectives, and the capital. The team invests in early-stage tech start-ups that are focused on building the new digital platforms driven by the data network. BEENEXT aims to establish a platform of founders, by the founders and for the founders across the globe, primarily in South East Asia, India and Japan. Since its establishment in 2015, the team has invested in over 200 companies globally. For more information, please click: www.beenext.com

About SOSV:

SOSV ? The Accelerator VC ? is an $800M venture fund operating global accelerator programs: HAX (Shenzhen/San Francisco) for hardware, IndieBio (San Francisco/NYC) for life sciences, Chinaccelerator (Shanghai) and Mobile Only Accelerator (Taipei) for cross-border internet, and dlab (NYC) for blockchain. SOSV invests in over 150 companies per year and over its two-decade history has a track record that puts it in the top 10% of VC funds in the world.

About WEH Ventures:

WEH Ventures is a sector-agnostic, seed-stage focused venture fund focused on the Indian market founded by Deepak Gupta and Rohit Krishna in 2017. The fund is very selective in its approach; it invests in about 15 companies per vehicle and continues to back the company for at least a couple of follow-on rounds. A number of the fund?s portfolio has emerged as market leaders in their domain, some of them include Pratilipi, smallcase, Animall & Trell. For more information, please visit our website.

About Redstart Labs (India) Ltd.

Redstart Labs is a subsidiary of InfoEdge India Limited, focus on fostering companies in the emerging science and tech space. Redstart invests in early-stage start-ups with deep-tech capabilities driven by research - old and new.