RightHand Robotics, a Somerville-based provider of piece-picking robots, announced on Monday that it has secured $23 million in a Series B funding round led by Calif.-based VC firm Menlo Ventures.
Earlier this year, Menlo Ventures led the $25 million Series B funding round of 6 River Systems, a Waltham-based collaborative mobile robot developer founded by former Kiva Systems (now Amazon Robotics) executives.
The company also announced two additions to the company’s board of directors: Mark Siegel, partner at Menlo Partners, and Mick Mountz, founder and former CEO of Kiva Systems. Launched in 2003, North Reading-based Kiva Systems was acquired by Amazon Robotics in 2012 for $775 million.
With customers buying more and more goods online, retailers are starting to explore the use of robots to automate the assembling line and fulfill these orders. Amazon is not the only e-commerce behemoth to be interested: in the last couple of years, Walmart too has begun using robots for shelf-scanning and inventory tracking and is currently testing grocery-picking robots made in North Billerica, Mass.
RightHand Robotics was founded in 2014 by a team from the Harvard Biorobotics Lab, the Yale GRAB Lab and MIT. In a statement, the company said it intends to use the funds to expand business and technical teams and broaden its suite of product applications in support of the company’s growing customer base.
Here's a video showing RightHand Robots at work:
"This funding is a testament to our team’s intense focus on solving the critical challenge all our customers face – namely, how to respond to booming e-commerce growth given a scarcity of labor," said Leif Jentoft, co-founder of RightHand Robotics, in a statement. "We are aggressively investing in talent acquisition, international growth, and advancing our RightPick product line to meet these needs."
GV (formerly Google Ventures) also joined this round along with existing investors, including Dream Incubator, Matrix Partners and Playground Global.
