Seegrid Corp., the Coraopolis-based makers of autonomous mobile robots capable of transporting goods found in warehouses, announced it closed on $30 million in financing as part of its $75 million Series C funding round. At the same time, it also confirmed layoffs.
The new capital will allow the company to continue building on its product development efforts, which include taking on over 23,000 square feet of new warehouse-like space next to its headquarters located at the Regional Industrial Development Corporation of Southwestern Pennsylvania's Park West Industrial Park off of Interstate 376. It brings the company's total footprint in the industrial park to nearly 155,000 square feet across four buildings. The new space will be used for the testing of autonomous forklift AMRs requiring lift heights of up to 35 feet.
The news comes at a time when the company announced layoffs affecting at least a quarter of its workforce, with Seegrid CEO Jim Rock confirming that about 90 workers across all positions within the company had been let go in recent weeks. Rock declined to provide current specific employment figures on the record, though the Business Times' List of Robotics and AI Companies had the previous employee count for the company listed at 350 workers as of July 2022.
"While regrettable, this decision was made in light of the global economic slowdown and to better position Seegrid, the leader in the mobile robot market, for long-term growth," Rock said in an email statement to the Business Times. "The investors, board of directors and executive leadership team continue to have confidence in the company’s vision, team and growth opportunity."
In an interview with the Business Times, Rock said: "It's quite a difficult decision for a company to lay off anybody, particularly those that are good people and performing well. … We're two years into a pandemic, and [there's the] war in Ukraine and the economy is terrible, and so the truth is that we expanded faster and more aggressively than sales allow us to do and so we made that very difficult but necessary decision to pull back. No one enjoys it; me most of all, having just finished building the company over the last eight years. It's quite a sad moment in Seegrid's history."
But the new funding will continue to add to the company's momentum, Rock said. It'll help extend the company's runway to keep current payroll levels running and also to support the continued commercial build-out of its Palion line of products, which includes autonomous forklifts, tow tractors and pallet trucks as well as the software that runs them.
"The whole point of [the funding] is to provide our customers with super-high levels of safety and reliability through all of this intelligent tech," Rock said. "That's here and now and the future going forward; the money, if you will, is all geared around further innovation in what we do."
Giant Eagle, Seegrid's majority owner, and G2 Venture Partners LLC, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm, led the round. Both companies are repeat investors in Seegrid.
