Robotics firm Sereact raises $5 million to ‘overcome labour shortages, fix supply chains and boost productivity’
German startup Sereact has announced a $5 million seed funding round led by Point Nine and Air Street Capital.
Founded in 2021, the company is building AI powered software that fully automates the pick and pack process in warehouses and manufacturing.
Its latest offering, PickGPT, combines its patented work in computer vision with large language models, the technology underpinning ChatGPT.
PickGPT is pitched as the first commercially available robotics transformer that enables robots to understand natural language and perceive their environment with an unprecedented level of intelligence and accuracy.
The aim is to democratise access to robotics by allowing users with no technical expertise to instruct and debug the system in a simple chatbot interface.
Ralf Gulde, Co-Founder and CEO at Sereact, says: “By combining large language models and robotics, Sereact has created the world’s most accessible way of interacting with robots. Today’s milestone will accelerate our mission of using fully autonomous robotics to overcome labour shortages, fix supply chains and boost productivity.”
Sereact will use the proceeds of the seed round to expand its interdisciplinary team and to support the development and international roll-out of PickGPT.
Nathan Benaich, Founding Partner at Air Street Capital, says: “As businesses embrace automation, they’ll need accessible technology that’s capable of handling challenging and unpredictable real-world environments.”
“The team at Sereact combines a deep understanding of the warehouse operating context with real technical ingenuity. As the first business to turn the combination of LLMs and pick-and-pack from an academic possibility to real-world impact, they’re building a product that’s still only scratching the surface of its potential use cases.”
Ricardo Sequerra Amram, a Partner at Point Nine, says: “Sereact brings a new paradigm to AI and robotics. By combining vision transformers and LLMs their solution is fast to deploy, easy to configure and provides the critical service level required by demanding industries like logistics and manufacturing.”
”The research done by Ralf and Marc during their time in academia is now applied to commercial use-cases and is currently in production in live environments with top enterprise customers.”
In addition to Air Street Capital and Point Nine, existing and new angels are also participating.
These include Alexander Diehl; Oliver Cameron (VP Product of Cruise, Co-Founder of Voyage); the Founders of Proglove and OMA Ventures; Achim Baier and Wolfgang Frank (Arconsis); Martin Giese; Michael Achtelik, Jan Stumpf and Daniel Gurdan (Founders of Ascending Technologies); Mostafa Elsayed (CEO and Co-Founder of Automata).
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