Unbox Robotics Raises $1.2 Mn In Pre-Series A Round The logistics automation market is expected to reach $86 billion by 2023

Logistics automation startup Unbox Robotics on Friday announced to have raised $1.2 million 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.

"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," said Hero Choudhary, managing partner, BEENEXT.

With retail and logistics companies increasingly looking to go the contact-less route fuelled by the pandemic, the approach to warehouse management has seen a significant shift in the last year.

"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," shared Duncan Turner, managing director, HAX, and general partner, SOSV.

Unbox aims to address the complex challenges faced by retail and logistics players when it comes to warehouse management in a sustainable manner.

"The Unbox team has taken a customer-first approach to solving 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," stated Rohit Krishna, general partner, WEH Ventures.

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.

"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," remarked Vibhore Sharma, partner, Redstart Labs (India) Ltd.

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 per cent, increasing personnel productivity by threefold, and reducing Capex by 40 per cent.

"With a massive surge in e-commerce, in the next 3-5 years, the logistics industry needs to handle about twofold 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-and-play swarm robotics system that can improve the package sorting productivity while saving the area by 50-70 per cent 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," added Pramod Ghadge, chief executive officer, Unbox Robotics.

Using proprietary Swarm Intelligence and ML algorithms inspired by nature, the company plans to redefine the way companies sort and ship orders.

The logistics automation market is expected to reach $86 billion by 2023