April 22, 2019
Locus Robotics announced today that they have closed a $26.2M series C round of funding, bringing their total funding to $66.6 M since the company was founded in 2015. The last round of funding was in 2017, which was similar in size at $25.1M. This round of funding comes from Zebra Ventures and Scale Venture Partners. Scale Venture Partners is also an investor in Soft Robotics and Drone Deploy, their other two robotics technology investments currently.
Expanding to Europe
Locus Robotics CEO Rick Faulk said the company would use the new funding to extend the company’s business into Europe. The company currently has some large US clients including, DHL and Geodis. “We will launch in Europe by midyear,” said Faulk. “We’re effectively being pulled over there by our big accounts. And later on we have opportunities in Asia. It’s just a massive worldwide market, with significant growth.”
In addition, Locus intends to develop “next-generation robots.” The current version of the Locus AMR is designed to work side-by-side with human warehouse workers and help them do their job more efficiently and effectively, without having to walk the long distances daily to shuttle totes to packout areas of the warehouse.
The Locus Robot
The Locus AMR uses barcode scanners embedded on the robots to scan products as they are picked by human workers and placed on pack out totes. Locus recently announced a major software release which enhances the user interface for the workers, including gamification to help encourage workers and entice them to achieve daily goals.
Locus Goes BIG at ProMAT
Locus Robotics is doing an estimated revenue run rate of $4.5M per year (source: Owler). However, the proof of Locus’ success and expectations was seen two weeks ago at the 2019 ProMAT show in Chicago, where Locus Robotics occupied a huge booth space (55’x60′), near the front of the show, with a theater, a small scale warehouse and a two story booth structure. They also brought 10 to 15 Locus employees to the show to work the floor. This was likely a $150K+ marketing investment for Locus and a huge step up from their last ProMAT show where they had a 20×20 booth in the back corner of the show. Locus is definitely playing with the big boys now, and this round of investment should go a long way to help them grow.
This screenshot of the ProMAT floor plan shows the size of the 2019 Locus Robotics booth.
A picture of the Locus Robotics ProMAT 2019 booth
