OSARO Raises $16M in Series B Funding

OSARO Inc., a leader in machine learning software for industrial automation, has announced $16 million in Series B funding, with participation from King River Capital (KRC), Alpha Intelligence Capital, Founders Fund, Pegasus Tech Ventures, GiTV Fund, and existing investors as well as strategics, bringing total funding to $29.3 million. According to Co-founder and CEO Derik Pridmore, the funds will be used to invest in talent acquisition, international deployments, and advancing the OSARO Pick and OSARO Vision product lines to meet customer demands.

The company's flagship product, OSARO Pick, automates stationary picking stations in "goods to robots" distribution centers. OSARO's robotic piece-picking software has improved performance and efficiency in e-commerce order fulfillment and intralogistics for multiple customers, including top material handling companies. OSARO plans to expand into handling order fulfillment in electronics, apparel, groceries, pharmaceuticals, and many other industries.

"We are very excited to be leading this funding round," said Megan Guy, Co-founder and Partner of King River Capital, who will be joining OSARO's Board of Directors. "It is rare and exciting to work with a team that has both world class deep learning talent and a highly commercial orientation. OSARO's perception and control software enables full automation of some of the most difficult vision, picking, and manufacturing problems, and its ability to integrate with a wide range of robotics hardware means that it can be deployed not only in greenfield environments but also as a retrofit solution to transform industrial automation."

Investment in warehouse and logistics automation is expected to increase from $8.3 billion in 2018 to $30.8 billion by 2022 (Tractica). OSARO's proprietary software enables industrial robots to perform diverse tasks in a wide range of environments, addressing growing labor shortages in fulfillment centers worldwide. The company is transitioning the automation industry from static robotic systems into dynamic solutions.

"A key element of our competitive advantage is OSARO Vision's deep learning algorithms," said CEO Derik Pridmore. "These algorithms generalize picking tasks with minimal training data and no SKU registration for quick, scalable solutions. In addition, as a software company, we support a wide array of commodity hardware and robotic arms which lets our customers select options that best fit their needs."

OSARO also announced that Kevin Pope has joined as VP of Engineering. With 30 years' experience in high-tech product development, he led engineering teams at Applied Digital Access, Mahi Networks, and Calix. Pope will support the company in scaling their AI-based robotic picking solutions worldwide.

"OSARO's approach of developing hardware-agnostic AI software for industrial robotics allows us to work in close collaboration with our customers, integrating OSARO products for their specific use cases, with a focus on scalability and robustness, providing our customers with a long-term competitive advantage. Our focus in the next year will be to increase our deployments in North America, Australia, Korea, China, Japan, and Germany," stated Pope.

About OSARO

OSARO is a San Francisco-based machine learning company, specializing in AI software for industrial automation. The company employs top talent from UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, and UMass. OSARO offers integrated perception and control software for industrial scale robotic deployments (ASRS systems, auto manufacturing, food prep, and e-commerce). Since 2015, OSARO's wider mission has been to build hardware-agnostic AI software that enables robots to function in a variety of environments and perform a diverse set of tasks. OSARO systems are compatible with various robots, sensors, and existing integrator workflows for scalable, fault-tolerant robotic deployments. The company's cloud-based data and GPU infrastructure is designed for the most flexible, intelligent picking system on the market. OSARO began deploying its first solution, OSARO Pick, in Japan in early 2018.