Pickle Robot Company develops tethered systems that teach off-the-shelf robot arms how to pick up boxes and “play Tetris” to automate truck and pallet unloading. The team is founded by a cast of MIT alumni and is led by CEO AJ Meyer. Pickle has run pilots with United Exchange Corporation and says it has unloaded tens-of-thousands of packages per month at customer sites, primarily in Southern California. The company positions its product as a focused solution to the challenging and repetitive work of unloading trucks and pallets. Pickle faces competition from other robotics players such as Boston Dynamics’ Stretch and Agility’s exploration of Digit for unloading, but sees a large addressable market. Management says the new funding will help accelerate customer acquisition and build the infrastructure to deliver more systems to more customers. Pickle Robot Company develops low-cost, collaborative package-handling robots that automate sorting, loading and unloading tasks in distribution and fulfillment centers. Its robots are designed to retrofit inexpensively into existing operations and increase the processing rate of the entire packaging facility. The company was founded by an MIT alumni group of robotics and machine-learning experts and focuses on systems that work alongside people at loading docks. Pickle’s stated mission is to move packages seamlessly in and out of distribution and fulfillment centers and to reduce the arduous human effort involved in order fulfillment. The company is based in Cambridge, Mass., and intends to scale its solutions through strategic partnerships and deployment across high-volume logistics operations. Pickle is an MIT spinoff that builds a collaborative package-picking robot named "Dill" focused on trailer unloading and loading-dock automation. The company says Dill can perform 1,600 picks per hour from the back of a trailer, which it claims is double the speed of competitors. Pickle emphasizes human-robot collaboration, designing people into the system rather than pursuing fully unsupervised solutions, and has deployed robots in real warehouses. Orders for the first product targeted at trailer unloading open in June, with an expected ship date in early 2022. The company launched with limited funding and a small team and recently closed a seed financing to support commercialization and scale production.

Total raised

$32M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Nov 2022