Photoneo Brightpick Group, the parent company of Photoneo, a leading provider of robotic vision sensors and intelligence software, and Brightpick, a leading provider of warehouse automation solutions for ecommerce and grocery order fulfillment, today announced it has raised an additional $19 million to complete a $40 million Series B. Taiwania Capital led this most recent round, which also included follow-on investments by prior Series B lead investors IPM Group and Alpha Intelligence Capital. Additional investors in this round include H&D Asset Management, Venture to Future Fund and Kolowrat Group. This round brings the company’s total capital raised since inception to $53 million.
Photoneo Brightpick Group has more than 300 employees and is used in over 5000 technology installations across the US, Europe and Asia. Its customers include leading companies such as General Motors, Volkswagen and KUKA. Currently, the US accounts for approximately 25% of Photoneo Brightpick Group’s revenue. The new funding will be used primarily to fund new installations of Brightpick’s warehouse automation solution in the US.
Brightpick has been actively rolling out its warehouse automation solution in Europe, including with Rohlik Group, one of Europe’s largest online grocers, with over 10 million orders per year and one million customers. Rohlik recently implemented the Brightpick solution to automate order fulfillment and dispatch in its Prague fulfillment center.
The Brightpick solution takes a month to deploy, enables warehouses to reduce their picking labor by 95%, and cuts costs for order fulfillment by half. The company is expected to announce a next-generation automated order picking solution, powered by proprietary machine vision and AI technology, in Q1 of 2023.
“We are seeing extremely strong interest from existing and new customers for Brightpick’s solution because it helps customers cut operating costs and eliminate labor challenges, two relevant concerns in today’s tough economic environment,” said Jan Zizka, CEO and co-founder of Photoneo Brightpick Group. “These new funds will help us accelerate the pace of deployment of our solution and scale our US presence.”
“Photoneo Brightpick Group has strong leadership, talented engineers and world-class technology that will fundamentally change how online retailers and grocers do order fulfillment in the future,” said Mitch Yang, managing partner at Taiwania Capital. “We look forward to working closely with them in this high-growth phase. In addition, we believe our connections to Taiwan’s ICT (Information and Communications Technology) sectors could add great value to this partnership.”