Unbox Robotics, a supply chain robotics technology company, raised USD 7 million in a Series-A round led by 3one4 Capital with participation from Sixth Sense Ventures and Redstart Labs (Info Edge). 

The company will use the funds to expand the team across functions, R&D, fulfil the customer demand internationally, and expand to new geographies. It has onboarded some large e-commerce and logistics enterprises as early adopters through pilots and has filed IP for the technology in India, the US and the EU.

Pramod Ghadge, CEO and Co-Founder of Unbox Robotics, said, “We believe that there’s a massive potential for building and deploying robotics tech to deliver more packages using smaller footprints at lower operational costs as we see more adoption of e-commerce and Q-commerce (quick commerce) across the globe. Since we launched our beta pilots with leading third-party logistics and e-commerce players in April 2021, we have already got orders from some of the leading e-commerce logistics companies.” He also informed that the company is on their way to convert every other pilot or demo into a commercial contract. “We will deploy the funds to build an A+ team to help our customers experience the future of logistics, sorting and supply chain across continents,” added Ghadge. 

Unbox Robotics specialises in robotics-based fulfilment and distribution technology for small to large e-commerce, retail and logistics enterprises. Its proprietary plug-and-play Swarm robotics can bring down the deployment time at locations to less than a week. The product can scan, sort, and dispatch packages in less than 50-70% physical space, improve personnel productivity by three times, and reduce operational cost by 60%. The system allows users to automate bigger facilities with a physical space of a few hundred thousand sq ft, as well as automate micro-hubs with less than 2,000 sq ft space through a compact vertical sorting mechanism. 

Founder and CEO of Sixth Sense Ventures, Nikhil Vora, said, “We believe the e-commerce and D2C boom is creating a large need for automation solutions within warehouses and FCs, with the industry slated to grow to $32 billion over the next 2-3 years. This, coupled with evolving consumer expectations, labour shortage, omnichannel distribution, and technology accessibility, has made robotics a priority for both e-commerce and fulfilment companies.” Anurag Ramdasan, Partner, 3one4 Capital, added, “Unbox Robotics is doing amazing work in identifying and solving these high-value problems and the team built by Pramod, Shahid and Rohit bring deep domain expertise to tackle this problem at scale.”

The round saw participation from Unbox Robotics’ founders including Pramod Ghadge, Shahid Memon and its CPO Rohit Pitale. Its current investors who participated included SOSV, Arali Ventures, BEENEXT, Dr Vijay Kedia (Kedia Securities), Karthik Bhat’s Force Ventures, Aditya Singh (Stride Ventures), WEH Ventures and Pavitar Singh (Sprinklr). Other participating investors include Nikhil Vora and Kathan Shah (Sixth Sense Ventures), Rahul Chaudhary (Treebo Hotels), and Veda VC.