Soft Robotics raises $20 million in funding round
Soft Robotics, a company that offers numerous products for the fresh produce industry, received $20 million in its latest funding round.
New investors include Hyperplane Venture Capital, Scale Venture Partners, Calibrate Ventures, Honeywell Ventures, Tekfen Ventures and Yamaha Motor Co., according to a news release. Earlier investors include Taylor Farms Ventures, ABB Technology Ventures, Haiyin Capital and Material Impact.
“We’re proud of the team’s work to date to scale up the Soft Robotics technology platform and gain significant commercial traction across our customer verticals,” CEO Carl Vause said in the release. “We’ve been able to address some of our customers’ largest supply chain and automation challenges, from picking and packing fresh produce and raw proteins to bin picking and retail order fulfillment.”
The tentacle-like grippers developed by Soft Robotics allow machines to handle delicate or unstructured objects.
The company also began piloting last year its SuperPick vision system, which uses workers to instruct the robots when they struggle to recognize items.
Grant Allen, head of ABB Technology Ventures, described Soft Robotics as representative of a major change in the broader landscape of automation.
“As a leader in industrial manipulation with over 300,000 robots deployed, ABB sees a huge number of amplifying automation solutions, but the intuitive control software Soft Robotics has created combined with their agile gripper is a linchpin of the automated warehouse,” Allen said in the release. “In an era of increasingly high-mix, low-volume production cycles coupled with the need for pain-free automation configurability, we are also extremely excited about the direction Soft Robotics is taking their core technology with SuperPick, allowing ABB arms to do more with less training, greater accuracy and increasing autonomy.”
