Nimble Raises $50 Million For Robotic Fulfillment Tech

Nimble Robotics, Inc. announced a $50 million Series A financing round on Thursday (March 11), a move designed to allow the robotics and eCommerce fulfillment technology firm to accelerate hiring, develop their product and technology, and scale robot deployments for fulfillment operations.

The financing, led by DNS Capital and GSR Ventures, with assistance from Accel and Reinvent Capital, comes at a time when eCommerce is experiencing a massive, COVID-fueled boom. Retailers are struggling to meet their fulfillment needs, giving companies like Nimble an opening to provide a robotic answer to a human labor shortage.

“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,” Nimble Founder and CEO Simon Kalouche said in the news release. “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.”

Robots can bring digital commerce to new levels of efficiency, as Attabotics CEO Scott Gravelle told PYMNTS last year. His Calgary-based company employs a “3D storage” holistic view that uses robotic wheeled shutters to transport goods to workers who pack and ship orders. The robots locate these workers as they ready for the last mile through warehouses that are vertical rather than horizontal, allowing retailers to reduce their warehouse footprints by a substantial margin while also shrinking delivery times.

As Gravelle explained, the shift toward an automated version of the picking and packing process — along with the consolidation of the fulfillment center — was in place long before the coronavirus arrived. The pandemic has simply sped up this shift. “All of the supply chains that existed were evolved from supporting brick-and-mortar retail distribution,” he said.

Nimble hopes to continue this evolution. “Nimble addresses both reliability and integration concerns,” said Fei-Fei Li, a seed investor and member of the Nimble board. “Their robots have been picking reliably in production, at scale for over a year for some of the world’s largest retailers. They’ve developed an AI-powered product that makes integration fast and frictionless for their retail customers.”