Unbox Robotics, a startup that is looking to automate complex warehouse operations, has announced raising of a $550K seed round. The round was led by CIIE.CO (IIM-A housed accelerator) & Arali Ventures. Existing investors Entrepreneur First (EF) and SOSV also participated in this round.
Warehouse operations are a complicated set of processes, to say the least. Everything from receiving of a parcel to sorting to final dispatch requires a slew of processes. And while bigger companies such as Amazon, Walmart, Flipkart and the likes do have partial automation in place, smaller businesses find it difficult to get hold of expensive automation technology. Unbox Robotics, along with a few other similar startups, are aiming to solve just that.
The startup is building a logistics automation system which could enable logistics players to automate and improve their operations on-demand with limited footprint and capital. This investment will be towards a robotics solution for parcel sortation in warehouses. The Robotics system is powered by a strong AI software that helps logistics and e-commerce companies efficiently sort parcels with a higher throughput using only half the space of currently available sortation systems.
“In my earlier role, I observed that the existing warehouse automation solutions were inefficient in terms of space utilization, installation time, and capital involved. We started Unbox Robotics to eliminate these inefficiencies. Shahid and I looked at every step of the process in the warehouses with a magnifying glass. Our eye to detail, revealed immense scope for improvements and gave shape to our first solution”, said Pramod Ghadge, Co-Founder & CEO, Unbox Robotics.
India, an emerging hub for e-commerce, has shipped out more than 1.5 billion parcels in 2018-19. The warehousing sortation solution market is poised to hit $20bn by 2023 globally. With the advent of automation in warehouses and adoption of picking up, there is an evident need for a robotics-based sortation system which is efficient both operationally & financially for most of the logistics & warehousing companies.
