Nomagic, a Warsaw, Poland-based developer of pick-and-place robots for warehouses, closed a $8.6 million seed funding round. The round was led by Khosla Ventures and is one of the biggest seed rounds for a Polish startup to date.
E-commerce order fulfillment faces worker shortages worldwide. Since automation can relieve human warehouse workers of tedious tasks, Nomagic claimed that its smart pick-and-place robots offer high flexibility and that they can help reduce the cost per pick.
The company added that its artificial intelligence and cloud platform enable its robotic arms to handle millions of different products. Magicloader is able to determine how to pick products never seen before and detect rare anomalies such as robots picking two items at once.
“There is no benchmark for pick-and-place robotics systems right now,” said Kacper Nowicki, co-founder and CEO of Nomagic. “The unique part of our solution is the focus on reliability of our systems and ability to minimize times when on-site operators have to take action. Our advanced anomaly detection systems identify rare cases when something goes wrong, and these are handled autonomously by the robot itself or remotely by one of our operators.”
Nomagic builds, deploys Magicloader
Magicloader analyzes the position, shape, and characteristics of each item, said Nomagic. It “inspects them and processes them in an efficient and reliable way using world-leading AI,” according to the company.
Nomagic uses off-the-shelf hardware with its machine learning software. “It is providing complete solutions to customers in a Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) model, where customers sign service-level agreements based on business metrics,” Nowicki told The Robot Report. “Nomagic delivers hardware and software and takes care of remote monitoring and maintenance of all its systems.”
Last year, Nomagic deployed its system at France-based Cdiscount to build the first fully automated packing line for e-commerce.
“Quality of service is essential for a leading e-commerce platform like Cdiscount, notably during peak seasons, such as Black Friday and Christmas,” noted Pierre-Yves Escarpit, deputy CEO of Cdiscount in charge of supply chain. “Operational excellence, rigorous forecasting, and warehouse automation are key to achieve our objectives. Nomagic solutions have proved reliable picking-and-packing products and consistently meet our expectations in terms of robot cadence and availability.”