Ultra raised $62 million in funding to expand deployment of its robotics platform, including a $50 million Series A led by Framework Ventures. The company said its focus is on solving what it views as one of the biggest bottlenecks in robotics: reliably deploying robots into real-world environments.
Ultra has spent the past two and a half years putting its robots in the field with customers, using warehouse environments as both training grounds and test beds.
The company said its robots now operate in warehouses across the U.S. and perform valuable work for customers daily.
Ultra’s strategy centers on making robots not only technically capable, but also useful, dependable, and easy to deploy repeatedly across different operating environments.
The company said demonstrating robotic capabilities in controlled settings is comparatively straightforward, while deploying systems in open environments requires solving for uptime, reliability, usability, and trust among the people working alongside the machines.
Ultra plans to use the new capital to continue expanding deployment and advance its mission to build highly useful, deployable robots.
The company is positioning itself around the idea that successful robotics adoption depends not just on hardware performance, but on the ability to repeatedly integrate robots into day-to-day customer operations.
KEY QUOTES:
“It’s relatively easy to make a robot look impressive in a controlled environment. It’s much harder to put a robot into the open world, make it useful, keep it running, earn the trust of the people working alongside it, and do that over and over and over again.”
“Ultra’s mission is to build the world’s most useful and deployable robots. And we’re just getting started.”
Ultra statement
