June 2, 2020
Locus Robotics announces that it raised a $40 million Series D round of funding to help support the growth of the R&D team and prime the further global expansion of the business. This round was led by Zebra Ventures along with existing investors Scale Venture Partners.
The Series D funding brings Locus Robotics’ total funding to more than $105 million. In addition to supporting the growth of the Company’s research and development (R&D) capacity to drive faster development of new warehouse robotics innovations, proceeds will be used to accelerate Locus’s expansion into new, global markets, including the launch of a European (EU) headquarters and several strategic reseller partnerships worldwide throughout 2020.
“Locus Robotics is thrilled to announce this new round of funding amid our most transformative year yet,” said Rick Faulk, CEO of Locus Robotics. “The new funding allows Locus to accelerate expansion into global markets, enabling us to strengthen our support of retail, industrial, healthcare, and 3PL businesses around the world as they navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring that they come out stronger on the other side.”
The impact of the pandemic is effecting retail. While Interact Analysis is predicting that new order intake of warehouse automation projects will likely decline by $2bn in 2020, they also believe that warehouse automation will come roaring back in 2021. With more shoppers moving online and staying out of brick and mortar stores, the opportunity for optimizing logistics and warehouse is going to enable innovation across the supply chain.
This investment for Locus comes at good time, if they can use the investment to establish sales teams and business development programs in new regions, then they will be able to get into the sales cycles for new warehouse automation projects in those regions. With automation sales cycles still taking 3-6 months, the investment will bridge them across and predicted dip in the economy.
Locus has a strong customer base which is a huge asset at time like this. Their customer list is well established, broad based, and entrenched in the middle of the logistics network of international business. So closing a series D at this moment in time is a wise decision and helps secures Locus's future as an industry leader.
Rick MacDonald, President, Retail, DHL Supply Chain North America, said: “DHL’s commitment to bringing scalable and proven productivity-enhancing technology for our customers has been a key factor behind our choice of Locus as a part of our technology strategy. Locus’s advanced AMR solution has allowed DHL and our customers to realize consistent improvements in productivity, speed, and flexibility that will help us further grow and seamlessly scale to meet the explosion of online ordering as we all adapt to the post-pandemic economy.”
