Photoneo Brightpick Group this week closed the sale of its Photoneo s.r.o. unit to Zebra Technologies Corp. Photoneo, the former sister company of Brightpick under the Photoneo Brightpick Group umbrella, is a leading provider of robotic vision sensors and intelligence software.
“This transaction produced significant capital to reinvest in Brightpick, while providing some return to shareholders,” stated Jan Zizka, co-founder and CEO of Brightpick. “With Brightpick’s 2025 production capacity fully booked, this funding enables us to scale manufacturing and deployment to meet the growing demand for our AI robots, expand to new markets, and serve even more customers.”
Photoneo Brightpick Group has renamed itself as Brightpick. The company will continue operating as a separate entity focused on developing and deploying AI robots to automate warehouse operations.
Brightpick said it will dedicate the majority of proceeds from the sale to accelerating deployment of its robot across the U.S. and Europe. To date, the company has secured a total of $47 million in funding.
Erlanger, Ky.-based Brightpick said its AI robots can automate order fulfillment, from picking and consolidation to dispatch and stock replenishment. It won Application of the Year in the 2024 RBR50 Robotics Innovation Awards for Autopicker, which combines an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) with machine vision, machine learning, and a robotic arm to pick directly to onboard totes.
Lincolnshire, Ill.-based Zebra Technologies specializes in scanning, track-and-trace, and mobile computing systems. It acquired AMR provider Fetch Robotics for $290 million in 2021.
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Brightpick expands its reach with Giraffe launch
Last month, the company announced Brightpick Giraffe, a robot capable of reaching heights up to 20 ft. (6 m) high, along with the first two U.S. customers of the new system.
With this advancement, Brightpick said users can now achieve up to three times the warehouse storage density of manual operations and double the density compared to the Autopicker.
The system has a telescopic lift that retracts during travel, reducing its height to 8.5 ft. (2.6 m), so it can be loaded and unloaded from a truck pre-assembled and upright. The company designed the mobile manipulator to deploy “out of the box” in warehouses in just a few hours, Zizka told Automated Warehouse.
Giraffe uses a new withdrawer to retrieve storage totes from upper-level shelf locations and deliver them to lower levels, where Autopicker can access them for picking at heights up to 11 ft. (3.4 m). After the picking, the robot returns the product tote to its original location. At 31.4 in. (80 cm) wide, Giraffe has the same footprint as Autopicker.
Brightpick will offer a first-hand look its robots at ProMat 2025 later this month. At the show, it will be demonstrating Autopicker at Booth N7744 in the North Hall of Chicago’s McCormick Place.
