Plus One Robotics
Canvas Category Machinery : Industrial Robot : Piece Picking
Plus One Robotics lives by the mantra, “Robots work. People rule”. That is because the company delivers an unparalleled approach to human-robot collaboration to tackle the challenges of variability and workforce shortages facing warehouses and distribution centers. The team has decades of collective experience developing logistics applications and deploying logistics robots for material handling tasks. Combining this experience with the team’s passion in harnessing the power of human intelligence with AI, improves people’s lives and simply changes the world.
Assembly Line
AI is touching your food—maybe most of it—by solving the food industry’s unique supply-chain challenges
Using AI to get your products from point A to point B is a growing solution to logistical hurdles, but in no other industry does it feel as nuanced as the food supply chain. That supply chain includes everything from natural agricultural and weather-related challenges to grow ingredients to inventory management and product shelf life: The end consumer needs that item to stay fresh long enough to cook it and eat it, be it at home or at a food service establishment.
Erik Nieves, cofounder and CEO of Plus One Robotics, explains, he has seen AI greatly reduce the time-to-shelf for several products. Part of that is with robotics, like his, that automate packaging systems in warehouses with the help of machine learning and 3D computer vision. The robots can hang out longer in a cold freezer to package temperature-controlled goods and also handle more manual labor than a human, even with a forklift. They are getting pretty good, he says, at detecting different types of fruit and adjusting their gripper strength to avoid bruising a ripe pear.
By analyzing historical sales data, AI is giving food distributors more insight into what is selling when—and informing its purchase orders accordingly. A 2022 study by the World Wildlife Fund found that AI software offered a 14.8% reduction in food waste per grocery store.
Plus One Robotics Raises $50 Million in Funding, Led by Scale Venture Partners, to Capitalize on $128 Billion Market Opportunity
Plus One Robotics, a provider of advanced AI vision software and solutions for robotic parcel handling, today announced that it has raised $50M in Series C funding. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners, with Partner Rory O’Driscoll joining the board of directors. Top Tier Capital Partners, Tyche Partners, ROBO Global Ventures, Translink, McRock, and Pritzker Group Venture Capital also participated in the round alongside existing investors, which brings the company’s total funding to date to nearly $100 million. Plus One’s technology helps to alleviate the persistent shortage of manual labor through robotic solutions, dramatically streamlining the parcel picking and depalletizing processes. Plus One deployments perform over one million parcel picks each day in production and currently hold an industry-leading metric of more than half a billion parcel picks globally. With these new funds, Plus One can further increase its capacity and rapidly scale deployment, as well as expand its sales and marketing efforts in North America and internationally.