Nimble, an AI robotics and autonomous e-commerce fulfillment technology company, announced the closing of a $106 million Series C funding round, elevating the company to a $1 billion valuation. This funding round was led by FedEx and co-led by existing shareholder Cedar Pine. As part of a strategic alliance, FedEx has entered into a commercial agreement to scale its FedEx Fulfillment service using Nimble’s technology and fully autonomous 3PL model. This funding emphasizes FedEx’s confidence in Nimble’s groundbreaking technology and its commercial potential.
This new funding will be strategically deployed to scale robot manufacturing and system deployments while enabling further investments in R&D towards Nimble’s mission of inventing autonomous logistics. Over 90% of warehouses still operate manually with minimal or no robotics. Even in today’s most automated warehouses, the limited intelligence of robots has restricted their utility to just a few warehouse functions—primarily storage and retrieval.
Nimble has broken through these limitations by creating an intelligent general-purpose warehouse robot – which is the first of its kind capable of performing all core fulfillment functions including storage and retrieval, picking, packing, and sorting, making it the most versatile robot and turnkey fulfillment solution in the market.
Nimble’s autonomous fulfillment centers are controlled through its Cloud Logistics Platform, which orchestrates fleets of its general-purpose warehouse robots. This platform offers omni-channel brands with a unified, all-in-one WMS, OMS, TMS, IMS, and RMS solution that not only manages and optimizes their logistics operations but also delivers real-time visibility and control across the entire supply chain.
KEY QUOTES:
“By collecting a large-scale data set, training state-of-the-art AI models, and engineering custom mobile manipulator robot hardware, Nimble has unlocked a new generation of fully autonomous turnkey fulfillment centers that are simple, reliable and more cost-efficient.”
-Fei-Fei Li, AI pioneer and Nimble Board Director
“Today’s warehouse automation systems require integrators to stitch together fragmented point solutions from dozens of equipment and software vendors, resulting in overly complex, inefficient, and expensive systems that are difficult to integrate, operate and maintain. The unattractive ROI and operational challenges of patchwork systems has limited the adoption of robotics to just 10% of the market. Nimble directly addresses this gap with turnkey autonomous fulfillment centers powered by our intelligent general-purpose warehouse robots—the first to reliably and cost-effectively handle all core fulfillment tasks. Our end-to-end fulfillment system replaces over a dozen individual pieces of equipment and software, streamlining installation, operations, maintenance and scalability while eliminating as much as 70% of the cost.”
-Simon Kalouche, founder and CEO of Nimble
“Nimble’s cutting-edge AI robotics and autonomous fulfillment systems will help streamline operations for our team members and unlock new opportunities for our customers. We’re excited to scale with Nimble’s technology to make our team members’ work easier while providing a differentiated, industry-leading fulfillment service.”
-Scott Temple, President of FedEx Supply Chain
“We are excited to continue supporting Nimble’s growth and transformation of the fulfillment industry. The company’s fully autonomous turnkey fulfillment centers will generate unique operational and economic efficiencies for FedEx and all of Nimble’s customers.”
-Stephen Weiss, a Nimble Board Member and Managing Director at Cedar Pine
