There's not much I need to say to convince you that ecommerce is a big deal. Just consider the outsize response to Amazon's announcement last week that one-hour delivery is coming to Boston. Or the huge backlash Amazon got when Bloomberg revealed the company had a gap in its Boston coverage for same-day delivery.
The market for warehouse and logistics robots will grow from $1.9 billion in 2016 to $22.4 billion in 2021.
Needless to say, ecommerce is big and will only continue to get bigger. And with that comes a greater demand for robots — robotic automation systems, to be more specific, that will help ecommerce companies process orders faster and more efficiently. (A recent report by Tractica said the market for warehouse and logistics robots will grow from $1.9 billion in 2016 to $22.4 billion in 2021.)
That's why Andy Rubin, co-founder of Android and the former head of Google's robotics division, is leading an $8 million Series A round for RightHand Robotics, a Somerville startup making warehouse robots for ecommerce companies. Other investors in the financing round included Matrix Partners, Seven Seas Partners, Dream Incubator and angel investors.
RightHand's new robot, called the RightPick, is a combined hardware and software system the company claims can pick up and sort small objects, typically five pounds or less, anywhere from 500 to 1,000 times an hour. The system uses machine learning software and sensors to figure out how to handle various items on the fly.
“RightHand Robotics has created a transformative technology combining machine learning and smart hardware to address a tremendous opportunity in the logistics industry,” said Rubin, who invested in RightHand through his hardware VC firm Playground Global. “For the first time, affordable industrial robots can grasp things they have never seen before.”
RightHand isn't the only Boston-area company working on warehouse and logistics robots. The most famous company in Massachusetts making warehouse robots is Kiva Systems, which Amazon acquired in 2012 for $775 million and eventually renamed to Amazon Robotics. Harvest Automation, a Billerica-based startup, attempted to get into the warehouse robot space to address the gap left by Kiva, but it failed and ended up selling the technology to NextShift Robotics, also in Billerica.
Leif Jentoft, co-founder at RightHand, told me one area where the RightPick can make a big different is the picking and sorting of lesser-value items because of how the robot can lower labor costs and pick items faster. The amount of money saved on picking a toothbrush, for instance, is far more significant than what you would save on a designer watch.
"It’s a nice combination of a new technology that has some transformative capabilities and a big need in the market."
The affordability of the RightPick system will also help companies avoid making investments in more expensive equipment that risks going unused in case there's downtime, Jentoft said.
RightHand already has some customers for the RightPick, though Jentoft declined to name any of them. However, he added, the company is seeing "a lot of traction" in apparel, consumer packaged goods, cosmetics, electronics and grocery.
"It’s a nice combination of a new technology that has some transformative capabilities and a big need in the market," he said.
While the company is focused on selling robots to ecommerce and brick-and-mortar retailers, Jentoft said, it eventually plans to expand to manufacturing, military and home automation.
"But I think right now logistics is the place to be," he added.
The company is located at Greentown Labs, the cleantech accelerator in Somerville, and it currently has about 20 employees. The new financing round to expand product development, hiring and marketing.
