Specific financial details of the investment made by U.S. Steel in Pittsburgh-based Freespace Robotics are being kept confidential, however both companies shared additional information on their recently announced partnership.
Freespace manufactures an automated storage and retrieval system for warehouses. It is a portfolio company of The Carnegie Foundry, which U.S. Steel (NYSE: X) invested in two years ago. Despite this partnership, U.S. Steel had not provided any funding to Freespace prior to their recent investment. The company will utilize the investment to hire more employees as they scale up for a commercial launch.
“Our investment will help Freespace execute on pilot projects and ramp up a manufacturing and operating presence that leads to sales and implementations,” Jim Cook, U.S. Steel Director of Strategy and Corporate Development, said.
Currently, Freespace operates a demonstration system in the National Robotics Engineering Center, a semi-autonomous unit of Carnegie Mellon University.
“The demonstrator system is used to present the system to prospective customers and industry partners for product shaping and business development opportunities,” Cook said. This system was demonstrated recently to Fives Intralogistics Corp., a company that provides and integrates automotive systems. Fives, based in Louisville, Kentucky, went on to partner with Freespace at the beginning of this month.
In addition to developing automative systems for warehouses, Freespace designed the system for trucks. However, trucks that do not have the system are still capable of working with warehouses that do have the system, and vice versa.
“Today, there are not many easy ways to transfer goods from warehouse to trucks,” Robert Szczerba, Freespace Robotics CEO, said. “Freespace envisions in its system a way to do this seamlessly and autonomously but neither system, truck or warehouse requires that both warehouse and truck be deployed to get the benefits in either one of them.”
In addition to developing the physical system, Freespace will offer software to manage inventory and controls for the system.
“That software will have an application programming interface that integrates with the Warehouse Management Software that controls all the different elements of warehouse operations,” Szczerba said. “This data and controls are in the hands of the customer and they or their vendors would leverage these to optimize performance.”
