Soft Robotics raises $20m in funding
Soft Robotics has raised $20m in an an oversubscribed funding round led by Hyperplane Venture Capital.
The new investors include Scale Venture Partners, Calibrate Ventures, Honeywell Ventures, Tekfen Ventures and Yamaha Motor Co.
Existing investors include Material Impact, ABB Technology Ventures, Taylor Farms Ventures and Haiyin Capital. Rory O’Driscoll from Scale Venture Partners and Kevin Dunlap from Calibrate Ventures will be joining the Board of Directors.
The company says that its automation systems stand out from the robotics crowd because they use “soft gripping systems that can grasp, manipulate, and conform to items with the same dexterity of the human hand”. In addition, the company recently launched a feature that “adds customized AI algorithms and vision technology to enable the robots to autonomously retrieve, sort and fulfill orders with little-to-no human intervention”.
Grant Allen, Head of Ventures at ABB Group, commented: “We saw early on that the Soft Robotics solution is a paradigm shift in the way our machines interact with their environment, especially in their ability to grasp deformable, delicate, binned or otherwise complex items.
“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.
“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.”
