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By Jennifer Smith 

Warehouse automation startup RightHand Robotics Inc. raised $23 million in a new funding round to add staff and develop more applications for its mechanical picking technology.

The Somerville, Mass., company's system, designed for e-commerce operations, incorporates artificial intelligence and cameras that perceive depth and color with a robotic arm that uses a polymer gripper with a suction cup to pick up objects. Customers include large retailers, pharmaceutical firms and logistics providers, the company said.

Venture-capital firm Menlo Ventures led the Series B round, which RightHand Robotics announced Monday. GV, the venture-capital arm of Alphabet Inc.'s Google, also contributed funding, along with existing investors including Dream Incubator, Matrix Partners and Playground Global. The four-year-old company has raised $34.2 million.

The company is one of several tackling one of the toughest problems robotics companies face as they try to expand use of automation in logistics and industrial operations. Robots have been increasingly used to move boxes, bins and even full racks of goods, but they so far haven't been able to match humans in simply picking up and moving the variety of objects that fill warehouses.

Research is going on as logistics operators say they face difficulty in finding enough workers in a tight labor market, pushing more companies to consider automation in their logistics operations.

The process known as picking is the biggest labor cost at online fulfillment centers, but the variety of items workers process has made automating it a challenge. Robots must learn to identify and grasp everything from cellphone chargers to jars of peanut butter.

The RightHand Robotics picking technology mimics a worker's hand-eye coordination by using machine-learning software to connect the vision system with the gripper. The "fingers" bend and twist around objects, and, like the cameras, send feedback on what works or doesn't work.

The system's accuracy "is comparable or exceeds human work in most cases, " said co-founder Leif Jentoft. The robots run between $75,000 to $100,000 apiece for the hardware, plus a recurring fee that covers software licensing and maintenance.

RightHand Robotics was founded in 2014 and has about 40 employees, with plans to double its head count in 2019. The company does business in the U.S., Europe and Japan, and is "doing several million of revenue," Mr. Jentoft said.

"They can just park these things and they get better and better over time," said Mick Mountz, the founder and former chief executive of the pioneering robotics firm Kiva Systems Inc., who is joining RightHand Robotics's board of directors. Amazon.com Inc. bought Kiva in 2012, and installed its shelf-moving robots in its fulfillment centers.

Write to Jennifer Smith at jennifer.smith@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

December 17, 2018 09:14 ET (14:14 GMT)

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