Ultra Robotics reports $62M in funding across two rounds

Ultra Robotics has reported $62 million in total funding across two rounds, not in a single financing. The Brooklyn-based warehouse-robot company’s $50 million Series A was led by Framework Ventures, while its earlier $12 million seed round was jointly led by Y Combinator and NextView Ventures, according to SiliconANGLE and Dealroom.

The company did not disclose a valuation, revenue, fleet size or the use of proceeds in the reporting reviewed. Y Combinator also participated in the Series A, Dealroom reported.

What does Ultra Robotics’ $62M funding support?

The reporting does not say how Ultra will spend the money. Its business is to build and install warehouse robots, then charge customers an integration fee followed by a monthly fee for hardware and software support. The arrangement is a robots-as-a-service model, which shifts the customer purchase from an equipment transaction to recurring operating spend.

Ultra’s main system is called OP1 Operator. The company says the wheeled unit can be moved by workers into position and locked in place, rather than driving autonomously around a facility. It plugs into a standard outlet and connects to a local network.

According to Ultra, OP1 Operator uses two grippers and can support several fulfillment steps: taking goods from shelves, separating mixed inbound shipments into bins, combining items for orders, placing goods into packages, sealing them and applying shipping labels. Ultra also says the robot can pick up items that fall to the floor. Those capabilities are company claims, rather than independently reported performance measures.

How does Ultra work with Physical Intelligence?

Ultra builds and installs the robot hardware, while Physical Intelligence provides the AI layer intended to help the machines learn and improve for particular warehouse setups, according to reports summarized by Dealroom and Value Add VC. The supplied reporting does not set out commercial terms for that relationship, including exclusivity or ownership of data.

Ultra says its robots have packed more than 500,000 orders at U.S. warehouse sites. That is the clearest operating metric disclosed in the available reporting, but it is a company-reported usage figure. No revenue total, customer count or installed-robot count was provided.

The financing gives Ultra named backers for both disclosed rounds, but leaves the underlying economics difficult to assess from outside the company. For a monthly hardware-and-support model, the missing details include deployment scale, recurring revenue and the cost of installing and maintaining each robot.

This story draws on original reporting from SiliconANGLE.