With the events of the past year, the Robotics industry has seen getting a lot of attention. Especially warehouse and logistics have been in the spotlight for the automation push as the businesses struggled to keep going while dealing with a labor shortage and stay-at-home orders.
A new startup Pickle and the funding round.
Pickle, an MIT spinoff, is one of the latest startups to enter the fray. It has been able to change the fact that it started with limited funding as it has successfully raised $5.57 million in funding during this hot investment streak. The seed round was led by Hyperplane and featured Third Kind Venture Capital, Box Group and Version One Ventures, among others.
Big claims are being made by the company regarding the performance and result deliverability of its first robot which the team has named “Dill”, a very interesting name for the machine. The claims say that the robot can do 1,600 picks per hour from the back of a trailer, a figure it claims is “double the speed of any competitors.”
Collaboration is the key to the play
CEO Andrew Meyer says collaboration is a key to the company’s play. Further adding he said, “We designed people into the system from the get-go and focused on a specific problem – package handling in the loading dock. We got out of the lab and put robots to work in real warehouses. We resisted the fool’s errand of trying to create a system that could work entirely unsupervised or solve every robotics problem out there.”
Orders for the first product targeted at trailer unloading will open in June, with an expected ship date of early 2022.