Logistics Automation Startup Unbox Robotics Bags Funding From BEENEXT, Others

Logistics automation startup Unbox Robotics has raised $1.2 Mn in a pre-Series A round from BEENEXT for team expansion, product improvements and scaling up early client pilots. Ubiquity Capital’s Karthik Bhat through his AngelList India syndicate, Info Edge-backed Redstart Labs (India), WEH Ventures and few marquee angel investors also participated in this round, along with existing investors Arali Ventures, SOSV and HAX, and Entrepreneur First.

Prior to this, the robotics company, which was a part of Flipkart’s startup accelerator programme Flipkart Leap, had raised $550K of seed funding in April 2020.

Founded by Pramod Ghadge and Shahid Memon in 2019, Unbox Robotics offers “software-defined” robotics and automation solutions that help logistics businesses improve package sorting as well as order consolidation processes. Besides this, it also helps companies optimise their floor space and capital utilisation in warehousing operations.

The company claims that its technology can reduce warehouse area by up to 70%, increase personnel productivity by 3x, and reduce capital expenditure by 40%. The company is currently in talks with six ecommerce and logistics enterprises in India, Southeast Asia, and the US to deploy its solution in the next 12 months and earn a seven-figure revenue, CEO Ghadge added.

“The Unbox team is striving to make automation easily available and accessible” using tech and big data. Their package sorting and order consolidation solution is bringing in multifold efficiencies for the logistic sector and next-gen companies across the globe. By reducing the warehouse area significantly, and enhancing efficiency in a short period, the company is paving the way to sustainable robotics,” Hero Choudhary, managing partner of BEENEXT, said.

Further, Duxan Turner, MD of HAX and general partner at SOSV, added that ecommerce has been growing rapidly across the globe, but the logistics infrastructure empowering better customer experience has struggled to keep up. Unbox Robotics’ CEO Ghadge reiterated that the logistics industry needs to handle about 2X the load they process today and online retailers need 3X more warehousing space than brick-and-mortar players.

“In such a situation, the industry needs flexible, compact, and on-demand sorting systems. However, existing sorting systems are difficult to scale up or down, require huge area, money & installation time. Having seen these problems first hand, we decided to build a plug & play swarm robotics system that can improve the package sorting productivity while saving the area by 50-70% compared to existing sorting systems,” Ghadge added.

Some of the other companies in the logistics tech segment are Freightwalla, which Indian shipping freight forwarder; Locus, which  bring predictive analytics to the logistics industry to ensure smoother supply chain; LogiNext, which runs on AI-based algorithms to predict location-based decisions and automates the delivery processes.