- Industrial automation software leader OSARO announced it has raised $16 million in Series B funding
OSARO — an industrial automation software leader — announced it raised $16 million in Series B funding with participation from King River Capital (KRC), Alpha Intelligence Capital, Founders Fund, Pegasus Tech Ventures, GiTV Fund, and existing investors as well as strategic investors bringing the total funding to $29.3 million in total funding. OSARO co-founder and CEO Derik Pridmore said that the funds will be used for investing in talent acquisition, international deployments, and advancing the OSARO Pick and OSARO Vision product lines in order to meet customer demands.
OSARO’s flagship product is called OSARO Pick and it automates stationary picking stations in “goods to robots” distribution centers. And OSARO’s robotic piece-picking software has improved performance and efficiency in e-commerce order fulfillment and intralogistics for multiple customers, including top material handling companies. OSARO is planning to expand into handling order fulfillment in electronics, apparel, groceries, pharmaceuticals, and many other industries.
“We are very excited to be leading this funding round,” added King River Capital co-founder and partner Megan Guy, Co-founder and Partner of King River Capital — who will be joining OSARO’s Board of Directors. “It is rare and exciting to work with a team that has both world class deep learning talent and a highly commercial orientation. OSARO’s perception and control software enables full automation of some of the most difficult vision, picking, and manufacturing problems, and its ability to integrate with a wide range of robotics hardware means that it can be deployed not only in greenfield environments but also as a retrofit solution to transform industrial automation.”
According to market intelligence firm Tractica, the investment in warehouse and logistics automation is expected to increase from $8.3 billion in 2018 to $30.8 billion by 2022. OSARO’s proprietary software enables industrial robots to perform diverse tasks in a wide range of environments, addressing growing labor shortages in fulfillment centers worldwide. And OSARO is transitioning the automation industry from static robotic systems into dynamic solutions.
“A key element of our competitive advantage is OSARO Vision’s deep learning algorithms,” explained Pridmore. “These algorithms generalize picking tasks with minimal training data and no SKU registration for quick, scalable solutions. In addition, as a software company, we support a wide array of commodity hardware and robotic arms which lets our customers select options that best fit their needs.”
Another announcement that OSARO made is the hiring of Kevin Pope as the VP of Engineering. Pope has more than 30 years experience in high-tech product development and he led engineering teams at Applied Digital Access, Mahi Networks, and Calix. Pope will support the company in scaling their AI-based robotic picking solutions worldwide.
“OSARO’s approach of developing hardware-agnostic AI software for industrial robotics allows us to work in close collaboration with our customers, integrating OSARO products for their specific use cases, with a focus on scalability and robustness, providing our customers with a long-term competitive advantage. Our focus in the next year will be to increase our deployments in North America, Australia, Korea, China, Japan, and Germany,” explained Pope.
