Soft Robotics raises $23m as FANUC gets onboard

Soft Robotics has closed a Series B funding round, raising $23 million co-led by Calibrate Ventures and Material Impact and including existing backers Honeywell, Hyperplane, Scale, Tekfen Ventures and Yamaha.

The robotics startup has also added FANUC Corp., the world’s largest industrial robot manufacturer, as a new investor. Soft Robotics previously announced a strategic partnership with FANUC to integrate its mGrip adaptable gripper system with any FANUC robot through the deployment of a new controller.

“This new funding will allow us to power the next phase of our growth strategy and continue to provide solutions to our customers’ greatest challenges,” says Carl Vause, CEO at Soft Robotics. “Variability is the kryptonite of the robotics industry. By offering a system that is able to grasp and manipulate items that vary in size, shape, and weight, we are able to solve the problem of high variability in both products and processes.”

In addition to automation solutions in food packaging and consumer goods manufacturing, Soft Robotics, which raised $5 million in a Series A round in 2015, is working with e-commerce, logistics and retail customers to address the high cost of online returns logistics.

“With the technology’s unique ability to handle the most unstructured and delicate items, Soft Robotics can now help automate reverse logistics: one of the costliest links in the online supply chain owing to high variation and high-value items such as apparel,” a press release notes.