Soft Robotics raises $23 million from investors including industrial robot giant FANUC

Published January 20, 2020

Robotics startup company Soft Robotics has closed its Series B round of funding, raising $23 million led by Calibrate Ventures and Material Impact, and including participation from exiting investors including Honeywell, Yahama, Hyperplane and more. This round also brings in FANUC, the world’s largest maker of industrial robots and a recently announced strategic partner for Soft Robotics .

The company said in a press release announcing this latest round of funding that the round was oversubscribed, which suggests it isn’t looking to glut itself on capital investors, given that this $23 million follows a similarly sized $20 million round that closed in 2018 which it also referred to as “oversubscribed.” Prior to that, Soft Robotics had raised $5 million in a Series A round closed in 2015. It has plenty of large, global clients already, so it’s probably not hurting for revenue.

Soft Robotics is focused on developing robotic grippers that, as you might’ve guessed from the name, make use of soft material endpoints that can more easily grip a range of different objects without the kind of extremely specific and tolerance-allergic complex programming that’s required for most traditional industrial robotic claws.

With its 2018 funding raise, Soft Robotics said that it was expanding further into food and beverage, as well as doubling down on its presence in the retail and logistics industries. This round and its new partnership with FANUC (which involves a new integrated system that pairs its mGrip robotic gripper with a new Mini-P controller, all with simple integration to FANUC’s existing lineup of industrial robots) will give it strategic and functional access to what is the most influenentioal industrial robotics company in the world.

This round will specifically help Soft Robotics spend on growth, looking to increase its variability even further and work on expanding its food packaging and consumer goods applications, as well as diving into e-commerce and logistics – specifically to help automate and improve the returns process, a costly and ever-growing challenge as more retail moves online.

Soft Robotics raises $20 million to expand operations

Published May 2, 2018

Massachusetts-based Soft Robotics announced this week that it’s raised $20 million in funding, courtesy of Scale Venture Partners, Calibrate Ventures, Honeywell Ventures and Tekfen Ventures, along with existing investors like robotics giant, ABB. The round follows a $5 million Series A the company closed back in late-2015.

The investment interest is pretty clear on this one. Picking and placing is the de rigueur industrial robotics challenge at the moment, and the company’s soft, air-filled hands offer a novel approach to the issue. The rubbery materials that comprise the company’s robotic grippers make them much more compliant and therefore more capable of picking up a variety of objects with minimal pre-programming and on-board vision systems.

Thus far, Soft has primarily found a spot for itself in the food industry, serving factories with delicate products like produce and pizza dough. It’s also been adopted by Just Born Quality Confections, the people who bring you Peeps.

According to the company, the new round will help push Soft even further into the food and beverage categories, along with a larger presence in retail and logistics. The involvement of Honeywell and Yamaha’s investment wings could also signal interest from those companies’ own warehouses. With the right air pressure applied, the system should be strong enough to pick up more solid objects.

Warehouse fulfillment has become increasingly strained in recent years, due to expectations from companies like Amazon, opening a space for robotics companies to address fast-paced but repetitive jobs like moving product onto and off of conveyor belts. Late last month, Soft showed off a low-cost, AI-driven warehouse system designed to retrieve products from bins to sort and fulfill retail orders with little oversight from its human counterparts.