Soft Robotics, a robotics company, has raised $20 million to expand its operations. Soft Robotics manufactures pliable grippers to hold the objects. It is now going to expand its operations to e-commerce and logistic application called Super Pick that uses a combination of artificial intelligence and human guidance to train its robots to pick up a range of differently-sized objects.
Robots are in use to pick, manipulate and sort all types of object. Soft Robotics is going to make it easier to handle food items from eggs to pastries and tomatoes, to hamburger patties by installing rubbery-tipped appendages to existing industrial systems. To generate reaction forces all soft robots need a system, through which the robots interact with their environment and move freely like humans.
Carl Vause, the CEO of Soft Robotics, states that “We’re proud of the team’s work to date to scale up the Soft Robotics’ technology platform and gain significant commercial traction across our customer verticals. We’ve been able to address some of our customers’ largest supply chain and automation challenges, from picking and packing fresh produce and raw proteins, to bin picking and retail order fulfillment.”
The new and existing investors are coming together which includes Calibrate Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Tekfen Ventures, Honeywell Ventures, Yamaha Motor, ABB Technology Ventures, Material Impact, Haiyin Capital and Taylor Farms Ventures with Hyperplane Venture Capital leading the round.
Rory O’Driscoll from Scale Venture Partners and Kevin Dunlap from Calibrate Ventures are joining as the board of directors.
Vivjan Myrto, partner and founder of Hyperplane states that, “This technology is a very elegant fusion of artificial intelligence and materials science. We think that gives it an advantage over pure machine learning”.
