Plus One Robotics is planning another expansion of its Port San Antonio operations, according to CEO Erik Nieves.
It will be the second time the five-year-old robotics company has expanded since 2020, having already added 15,000 feet to its space at the southwest side port in May. The company's first space was a 2,500-square-foot suite near the Port SA's Tarmac.
Plus One's focus is expanding the capabilities of warehouse robots with new software to help scan items, grippers for pulling items from shelves and a software cloud service that signals for assistance.
Plus One Vice President of Marketing and Communications Sheryl Seitz told the Business Journal that the company has already built out a new customer experience center and a space for a lab. Nieves said the company needs more room for both human engineers and robots to have a designated space.
"When we make that leap ... the expansion will be exclusively for engineering," he said. "We’re going to have a lot of people (in the new space) but no robots. Currently, the May expansion was split before robot space and people space, (which wasn't) viable long term."
He noted that the timing is not yet finalized.
"We have already engaged with architects for design and layout and trying to understand what the building costs will be," he said.
According to an end-of-year blog post by Nieves, business has soared during the pandemic as more employers look toward automation to employ Covid safety mechanisms and combat worker shortages.
The company has expanded from 42 full-time employees to more than 70 across its three offices in Port San Antonio, the Netherlands and Boulder, Colorado. It will soon be moving into a new facility in the Netherlands that is much larger than the Port's headquarters, Nieves said.
Throughout 2021, Plus One kicked off new partnerships and fostered old ones with companies such as Attabotics, Calvary Robotics, Pearson, Solution Net Systems and others. FedEx is a customer of PlusOne, as its labor needs are great and the volume of e-commerce is expanding, and they will likely expand their use of automated tools — including robots — in the near future due to the growing need, said Nieves.
In October, Plus One teamed up with Locus Robotics, a leader in autonomous mobile robots, to work on a cross-platform robot system that will combine mobile robots and stationary picking arms to improve productivity in e-commerce fulfillment centers.
In its most recent funding round in April, helmed by McRock Capital and TransLink, the company also brought aboard two news Texas-based investors, Perot Jain and Ironspring Ventures, and received $33 million in funding overall from these and other new investors, as well as existing investors like Lerer Hippeau, Pritzker Group Venture Capital and others.
