Berkshire Grey, a robotics and AI company that offers retail, e-Commerce and logistics fulfillment automation solutions, has raised $263 million in Series B financing to fund global expansion, potential acquisitions and team growth. The round is led by Softbank and includes participation from investors Khosla Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and Canaan.
The company positions itself heavily on automation’s ability to boost productivity, claiming to increase e-Commerce operations by 70% to 80% and improve throughput by 25% to 35%.
Berkshire Grey solutions are designed to automatically pick, pack and sort individual items, inner packs, cases and parcels to automate omnichannel warehouse and distribution operations. The company logs real-time data to inform future decisions and generate intelligent product-handling and process-operating behaviors, so that each system learns from its own activities, as well as from other systems within a facility or deployments across the client network.
The Berkshire Grey platform constantly reacts to changes in the environment, such as containers filling or emptying and products shifting in order to optimize real performance, and it performs preemptive self-diagnoses for preventative maintenance purposes.
Advertisement
Additionally, the systems are designed to integrate with existing IT infrastructures and plug into commonly used APIs. Berkshire Grey also offers a web-based management dashboard for tracking work progress and monitoring system performance on desktops and mobile devices, with metrics and operational statistics such as picks-per-hour and order completion status as well as push notifications related to order status and inventory availability.
