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

The round also saw participation from Unbox Robotics’ founders Pramod Ghadge, Shahid Memon, and its CPO Rohit Pitale, alongside its existing investors – US-based venture capital firm SOSV, Arali Ventures, WEH Ventures, BEENEXT, Karthik Bhat’s Force Ventures, Dr Vijay Kedia (Kedia Securities), Aditya Singh (Stride Ventures) and Pavitar Singh (Sprinklr). Other investors who participated in the round include Rahul Chaudhary (Treebo Hotels), Nikhil Vora and Kathan Shah (Sixth Sense Ventures), and Veda VC.

The startup has raised $9.1 million in funding including the current round.

According to the startup, the funding raised will be primarily used to expand the team across functions, fulfil the customer demand internationally, for R & D, and to expand to new geographies.

The company has already onboarded some of the largest ecommerce and logistics enterprises as early adopters through trials/pilots and has filed IP for its technology in India, the US and the EU, it stated.

Specialised in robotics-based fulfilment and distribution technology for small to large ecommerce, retail, and logistics enterprises, Unbox’s robotics solutions are built to consolidate customers’ orders in fulfilment centres, as well as to sort them as per final delivery locations in distribution centres or delivery hubs.

Pramod Ghadge, CEO and Co-founder of Unbox Robotics, said, “We are obsessed with improving the ways packages are handled, distributed, and delivered to end customers. We believe 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 ecommerce and Qcommerce (quick commerce) across the globe.”

“Since we launched our beta pilots with leading third-party logistics and ecommerce players in April 2021, we have already got orders from some of the leading ecommerce logistics companies. We are on our way to converting 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.”

The startup claims that its proprietary plug-and-play Swarm robotics can bring down the deployment time at locations to less than a week. The product’s USP lies in its ability to scan, sort, and dispatch packages in less than 50-70 percent physical space, while improving personnel productivity by more than 3X and reducing operational cost of package sorting by more than 60 percent— thereby solving challenges in warehouse management sustainably. The first-of-its-kind system allows users to automate not just bigger facilities with a physical space of a few hundred thousand sq. ft, but also automate micro-hubs with less than 2,000 sq. ft space through an innovative and compact vertical sorting mechanism.

Speaking to YourStory, Pramod added, “We are growing our team across functions – technology, business, operations, etc., to ramp up our capacity to deploy our systems across multiple continents in 2022. Our robots should sort more than a million shipments a day by the end of next year through these deployments.”

“Unbox Robotics takes a novel approach in technology development to crack some of the most critical concerns in customers’ supply chains. We are excited to build a diverse team and further develop outstanding robotics technology for the future of global supply chains,” added Shahid Memon, CTO and Co-founder of Unbox Robotics.

Speaking on the investment, Anurag Ramdasan, Partner, 3one4 Capital, said, “Globally, supply chain and logistics have been reshaped with the growth in ecommerce and D2C over the last decade. Every layer of the stack today requires incredible optimisation and automation to service the growing demand.”

“Unbox Robotics is doing amazing work in identifying and solving these high-value problems and the team built by Pramod, Shahid, and Rohit brings deep domain expertise to tackle this problem at scale. We are highly excited to start this journey with them as they streamline logistics and redefine the space,” he added.

Nikhil Vora, Founder and CEO of Sixth Sense Ventures, commented, “We believe the ecommerce 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 two to three 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. Unbox’s compact, vertical, and modular system is well suited for current market needs. Excited to partner with Pramod and Shahid, who bring deep and relevant industry experience as we scale the company together.”