Last month, Pick8ship Technology AG rebranded to make clear that “P8S stands for the next generation of warehousing.” The Zurich-based startup combines robotics, smart containers, and artificial intelligence to automate storage, picking, sorting, and shipping with a modular system.
“We started from last-mile e-commerce and came into the fulfillment center, and then things broadened by industries that requested services from us,” recalled Josef Haid, founder and CEO of Pick8ship. “We also left the prototype stage behind and completed our third-generation robot this summer. We added the new container system, which is basically a tray that you can extend to a box of different heights, even in a loaded state.”
“Everyone is following in the footsteps of Kiva,” he acknowledged to Automated Warehouse. “Founders Mick Mountz and Raffaello D’Andrea started the first AGV-based system in 2003. But a challenge with that kind of system is that if you have high throughput, then you have a lot of robots and have to drive a shelf through the entire warehouse just to do one pick.”
Pick8ship collects trays for faster picking
“What we do differently is that we drive with a container through the aisle and collect trays of 30 to 60 items,” Haid explained. “Then you have a shelf full of picks in front, which makes picking faster than Kiva or traditional Geek+ systems.”
Pick8ship said its mobile robot can handle 150 to 180 trays per hour, so fewer robots are needed. It noted that its proprietary smart container can provide storage up to 4 m (13.1 ft.) high for goods of 4 to 80 cm (1.5 to 31.4 in.) in height, without fixed shelving.
The company added that its TrayBOX storage tray offers variable height with extension frames, even during replenishment, to maximize density and picking efficiency. P8S works with standard bins or cardboard boxes, but it built its own shelving.
“We call it a robot container, like a mobile ASRS,” said Haid. “At the workstations where people do the picking, we have process stations. The P8S system is extremely flexible — it can exchange with AGVs, go to a neutral station, or pick into pallets, shipping containers, or pick-and-ship containers.”
“You can change for different types of orders,” he added. “If, for example, you do B2B [business-to-business] orders, you want to pick to pallets, but for B2C [business-to-consumer] parcels, you might want to go into a trolley. Without rebuilding your system or reprogramming any software, you can work with any of these requirements with this system.”
The Infinity.ai software integrates data with ERP (enterprise resource planning) and e-commerce systems via APIs (application programming interfaces).
P8S picks build versus buy for its systems
Pick8ship didn’t plan to build its own AGVs, vision-based positioning system, or AI software, but the complexity of storage and the end-to-end opportunity led it to that conclusion, Haid said. He has looked for partners in motors and gearing.
software. Source: Pick8ship
“We’re lucky to have a group of entrepreneurial investors who love what we do,” said Haid. “They know that we are not a fast partner. We basically develop our technology through the first applications and scale. We already have our fifth generation of containers.”
“We’re now doing a final step to bring costs down and make the P8S system easy to produce and install,” he said. “It’s really a next-generation product because it has completely new electronics, a new battery system that more than meets standards requirements, and it’s really an adoption-ready machine.”
Startup promises productivity gains
Pick8ship claimed that its system can accelerate picking by six to eight times, with the robots collecting 40 to 80 bins per run rather than having to make individual runs. It said this allows for up to 600 items per hour at workstations.
The company also asserted that its modular storage is three to five times higher than manual racks, offering double the capacity of ASRS and potentially saving more than 50% in space. P8S also promised to reduce costs by 50% to 70% and packaging by up to 90% and to provide a return on investment (ROI) in just three years.
“Our big interest is not only to automate an existing process in a warehouse, but also to optimize the end-to-end process as much as it’s possible,” said Haid. “If we can pick orders into a container, we don’t have to touch that container. We can put it on a truck. We can put it in a van. We can go into delivery. We can solve those containers afterwards. We can use them as storage. So there’s a lot of value coming with this end-to-end optimization.”
As “people against inefficiency,” Haid said P8S is working on a non-humanoid picking system and plans to continue entering new markets.
Pick8ship looks beyond logistics, electronics, and food
Seventy-five percent of warehouses over 5,000 sq. m (53,819.5 sq. ft.) are not yet automated, noted Pick8ship. The company has worked with customers for three years and tested multiple projects in its experience center near Zurich. It said it supports everything from bulk orders to cold chain and automated picking.
P8S’s initial target market was healthcare, but the COVID-19 pandemic derailed a hospital pilot, said Haid. The startup then expanded into groceries, industrial parts for assembly, electronics, fashion, and pharmaceuticals.
“We’ve had more requests from different industries,” Haid said. “We’re working with some companies that want very large systems that we can’t do yet. We first need to prove ourselves in the operating environments of small or medium-sized customers. We’ll then run projects with big corporations as second installations after these pilots.”
P8S typically starts small, with a 100 sq. m (1,076.3 sq. ft.) pilot and 4,000 picks per day and then scales rapidly to more than 50,000 picks per day by adding containers and robots. While the company has continued serving grocery stores, it didn’t find a large enough market in quick commerce, but that could change, said Haid.
“The interesting thing if you look at the food delivery companies is that they’re claiming that 30% of their revenues comes from groceries, so the market is there,” he observed.
As last-mile delivery expectations continue to accelerate with e-bikes, trailers, and robots, Haid said he expects micro-fulfillment centers to return, but with more flexible automation. “Amazon won 50% of the European market, and the Asian players are coming,” he said.
“We’re also definitely looking to North America, because it’s the most important market in automation. It’s far bigger than Europe but is less automated and less complex,” said Haid, who attended the 2025 Robotics Summit & Expo in Boston.
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