RightHand Robotics, a Somerville, Massachusetts-based robotics company, has announced it has raised $23 million in Series B funding led by Menlo Ventures. Google’s GV also joined this round along with existing investors Dream Incubator, Matrix Partners, and Playground Global. In conjunction with this funding round, Menlo Partners partner Mark Siegel is joining RightHand’s board of directors.
RightHand Robotics provides robotic piece-picking solutions that improves performance and efficiency in e-commerce order fulfillment and intralogistics. And its product platform is a software-driven and hardware-enabled solution that can handle the core task of picking and placing items in a wide range of workflows and processes.
With this round of funding, RightHand Robotics plans to expand its business and technical teams. And the company is going to broaden its suite of product applications.
Using RightPick’s solutions, businesses are able to reduce the cost of order fulfillment in electronics, grocery, pharmaceuticals, apparel, and several other industries. The company was founded in 2014 by DARPA challenge-winning team from the Harvard Biorobotics Lab, the Yale GRAB Lab, and MIT.
“This funding is a testament to our team’s intense focus on solving the critical challenge all our customers face – namely, how to respond to booming e-commerce growth given a scarcity of labor,” said RightHand Robotics co-founder Leif Jentoft. “We are aggressively investing in talent acquisition, international growth, and advancing our RightPick product line to meet these needs.”
RightHand’s platform known as RightPick addresses the challenges that arise due to the shift to online shopping and the need for retailers to compete by delivering goods directly to consumers when and where they want it. One of the biggest reasons why e-commerce orders are labor-intensive than traditional retail store restocking is because of the number of “touches” that each of the items requires.
GV General Partner Andy Wheeler explained that RightHand Robotics has developed a comprehensive solution that resonates with a wide variety of e-commerce companies. “The founding team of roboticists at RightHand have the right expertise, full-stack product, and overall vision to make an impact on this growing market,” Wheeler pointed out.
RightHand Robotics also announced that Kiva Systems founder and former CEO Mick Mountz is joining the company’s board of directors. Mountz had spent 13 years in product development, manufacturing, and marketing at Motorola, Apple, and Webvan. Then he founded Kiva in January 2003.
“We are thrilled to be leading this funding round,” added Siegel. “We have been continually impressed by RightHand’s customer traction and industry track record, with deployments in North America, Japan, and Europe. What inspired us to invest were the testimonials we heard from customers who have used RightHand’s technology and rank it highly with respect to range, rate, and reliability. It was clear that their systems can provide users with a long-term competitive advantage.”
