Material handling automation company receives $50M in funding

Vecna Robotics, a Boston-based material handling automation company, has raised $50 million in Series B funding to scale its products to market.

The company is a developer of workflow orchestration and self-driving forklifts. Its fully autonomous pallet trucks and tow tractors are combined with Pivotal, an artificial intelligence (AI)–based orchestration agent.

Pivotal is a next-generation fleet management platform that interfaces with human workers and other equipment to optimize freight capacity, increase warehouse capacity and help eliminate waste.

In the last year, Vecna Robotics deployed its robot and software solutions in many of the world’s leading distribution centres with deployments at FedEx Ground, Milton CAT, DHL Supply Chain, GEODIS, Medline and many others.

The funding round is led by Blackhorn Ventures, with participation from new investors Highland Capital and Fontinalis Partners, and additional funding from existing investors Drive Capital and Tectonic Ventures.

“Vecna Robotics’ focus on the Pivotal platform and innovative AMRs to create unprecedented resource productivity for industrial applications is strongly aligned with our investment strategy,” says Trevor Zimmerman of Blackhorn Ventures. “We are excited to be a part of their growth.”

Zimmerman of Blackhorn Ventures and Bob Davis of Highland Capital will join Vecna Robotics’s board of directors.

The mobile robot market is expected to hit double-digit annual growth over the next five years.