The company raised $32 million in additional funding led by Tiger Global and Bow Capital. A recent $23 million deal with the company to deploy Ambi's hardware in U.S.-based Pitney Bowes fulfillment centers is a strategic investment by the company.
The new capital came in the form of a SAFE, or simple agreement for future equity, which gives investors the right to purchase equity in the company at a future date. Jim Liefer says that it will be put toward continued deployment and installations of the tech, as well as expanding the company's product portfolio.
Liefer said in an email that the additional funding round came together very quickly. It sparked interest to further fuel manufacturing and deployment of our current and future categories of artificial intelligence-powered parcel sorting systems.
Ken Goldberg is the chair of the industrial engineering and operations research department at UC Berkeley. A group of scientists and engineers from UC Berkeley launched the company in 2019.
There is an artificial intelligence system that trains on thousands of images of 3D models of objects. The system uses deep learning to figure out how to pick up the objects.
There is a row of robotic arms in a warehouse. The image is from AmbiRobotics.
The robotic platform built by Ambi builds on this. The company claims its products can be taught to pick and pack millions of unique items while adapting to different packaging on the fly.
Using end effectors like suction cups, Ambi machines pick, Scan, insert, place and pack items in mail sacks on fulfillment center floors. Software running in the background analyzes data on productivity, item dimensions and weights, utilization and more and identifies pick points on items in cluttered environments.
Customers pay upfront for the robotic units and then pay a monthly fee for the software.
Liefer said that the team at AmbiRobotics brings a new way of thinking about traditional problems. With advanced tech that can solve a wide range of real-world problems, the team has decided to use their expertise to drive the exploding ecommerce industry toward a sustainable supply chain.
According to Liefer, the current focus of the company is to deploy the latest generation of its tech robotic, AmbiSort A-Series v3 which has a soft-touch end effector that can handle both rigid and flexible items. Three to four of these systems can be used by warehouse associates to increase throughput to over 1,200 items per hour.
There is a favorable investment climate for robotic devices. More than $17 billion was poured into robotic startups in the year 2021. In April, Amazon said it would create a $1 billion fund to back companies in the customer fulfillment, logistics and supply chain sectors. Walmart and Symbotic expanded their partnership in May to include all of Walmart's distribution centers in the US.
According to Statista, the global warehouse automation market was worth billions of dollars. Within the next four years, that number is expected to double, with supply chain executives in a survey saying that automation is one of their top three investment priorities.
According to Leifer, Ambi began generating revenue through commercial deployment in October 2020. The company is in the process of installing 80 parcel-sorting systems while also supporting more than 80 full-stack sorting systems across 15 sorting hubs.
Ambi Robotics is an important part of an innovation strategy that is helping Pitney Bowes improve service to our clients and efficiently grow our global e- commerce business. The same commitment to client-led innovation that has helped Pitney Bowes evolve and win in the marketplace for over 100 years is what we see in AmbiRobotics. We are looking forward to working together to drive innovation.
The Berkeley-based company has raised over $65 million and has more than 50 employees.
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