Startup News: robotics vendor Nimble raises $50 million in financing round

Nimble Robotics, a robotics and ecommerce fulfillment technology company, today announced a $50 million Series A financing led by DNS Capital and GSR Ventures with participation from Accel and Reinvent Capital among others. The capital raised will further accelerate the company’s hiring plans, product and technology development and scaling of robot deployments for its customers’ fulfillment operations.

The company also announced the appointment of two artificial intelligence (AI) industry pioneers to its board:

• Fei-Fei Li, Sequoia Professor Computer Science at Stanford University; Co-Director of Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI); former Director of Stanford AI Lab (SAIL): and former Chief Scientist of AI at Google Cloud.
• Sebastian Thrun, Founder of GoogleX and Waymo (Google’s self-driving car division), co-founder of Udacity and CEO of Kitty Hawk, former Director of Stanford’s AI Lab (SAIL)

Nimble’s mission is to democratize affordable, on-demand fulfillment for every ecommerce retailer. According to Nimble, its AI-powered robots intelligently pick, pack, and handle millions of products, spanning from apparel and electronics to beauty, general merchandise and grocery items. Today, Nimble robots are deployed in fulfillment centers across the United States picking over 100,000 items per day for customers including several Fortune 500 retailers.

Catalyzed by the Covid-19 pandemic, ecommerce doubled in 2020, accelerating nearly 10 years of growth in the span of just a few months, according to McKinsey & Co. Finding reliable warehouse labor now ranks among the highest pain points for retailers as they attempt to maintain business continuity and simultaneously scale their fulfillment operations. With a declining available labor pool and sky-rocketing ecommerce sales there is a shortage of over half a million warehouse workers. Robots can help fill this labor void, Nimble’s leadership stated.

“There is no fulfillment solution that can handle double the orders, fulfill them in half the time, with half the staff, for half the cost,” said Simon Kalouche, Nimble’s founder and CEO. “We’ve assembled an all-star team of engineers to build the future of autonomous on-demand fulfillment to solve this problem. Our next-gen robotics technology will allow retailers and grocers of all sizes to have the fastest and most affordable fulfillment.”

The company, headquartered in San Francisco, intends to double its workforce in 2021.