SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nimble, a pioneering AI robotics and autonomous e-commerce fulfillment technology company, today announced the successful closure of a $106 million Series C funding round elevating the company to a $1 billion valuation.
Strategic Investment and Alliance
The funding round was led by FedEx and co-led by existing shareholder Cedar Pine LLC. As part of their strategic alliance, FedEx has entered into a commercial agreement to scale its FedEx Fulfillment service using Nimble's technology and fully autonomous 3PL model. The investment underscores FedEx’s confidence in Nimble's groundbreaking technology and its commercial potential.
The new capital will be strategically deployed to scale robot manufacturing and system deployments while enabling further investments in R&D towards Nimble’s mission of inventing autonomous logistics.
Revolutionizing Warehouses
More than 90% of warehouses today still operate manually with minimal or no robotics. Even in today’s most automated warehouses, the limited intelligence of robots has restricted their utility to just a few warehouse functions—primarily storage and retrieval.
Nimble has broken through these limitations by developing an intelligent general-purpose warehouse robot—the first of its kind capable of performing all core fulfillment functions including storage and retrieval, picking, packing, and sorting, making it the most versatile robot and turnkey fulfillment solution in the market.
“By collecting a large-scale data set, training state-of-the-art AI models, and engineering custom mobile manipulator robot hardware, Nimble has unlocked a new generation of fully autonomous turnkey fulfillment centers that are simple, reliable and more cost-efficient,” said Fei-Fei Li, AI pioneer and Nimble Board Director.
Simon Kalouche, founder and CEO of Nimble, articulates the company’s unique value proposition: “Today’s warehouse automation systems require integrators to stitch together fragmented point solutions from dozens of equipment and software vendors, resulting in overly complex, inefficient, and expensive systems that are difficult to integrate, operate and maintain. The unattractive ROI and operational challenges of patchwork systems has limited the adoption of robotics to just 10% of the market. Nimble directly addresses this gap with turnkey autonomous fulfillment centers powered by our intelligent general-purpose warehouse robots—the first to reliably and cost-effectively handle all core fulfillment tasks. Our end-to-end fulfillment system replaces over a dozen individual pieces of equipment and software, streamlining installation, operations, maintenance and scalability while eliminating as much as 70% of the cost.”
Nimble’s autonomous fulfillment centers are controlled by its Cloud Logistics Platform, which orchestrates fleets of its general-purpose warehouse robots. The platform provides omni-channel brands with a unified, all-in-one WMS, OMS, TMS, IMS, and RMS solution that not only manages and optimizes their logistics operations but also delivers real-time visibility and control across the entire supply chain.
Expanding Capabilities and Market Reach
Scott Temple, President of FedEx Supply Chain, commented on the strategic alliance: “Nimble's cutting-edge AI robotics and autonomous fulfillment systems will help streamline operations for our team members and unlock new opportunities for our customers. We’re excited to scale with Nimble’s technology to make our team members’ work easier while providing a differentiated, industry-leading fulfillment service.”
“We are excited to continue supporting Nimble’s growth and transformation of the fulfillment industry,” said Stephen Weiss, a Nimble Board Member and Managing Director at Cedar Pine LLC. “The company’s fully autonomous turnkey fulfillment centers will generate unique operational and economic efficiencies for FedEx and all of Nimble’s customers.”
About Nimble
Nimble develops next-generation autonomous e-commerce fulfillment centers — end-to-end turnkey warehouses that operate at a fraction of the cost and complexity of today’s leading goods-to-person based warehouses. Nimble’s core technology is an intelligent, general-purpose warehouse robot that can perform all core fulfillment tasks. Paired with the Nimble Cloud Logistics Platform, the solution replaces dozens of complex fulfillment systems, resulting in warehouses that are simpler, more reliable and easier to install, operate, maintain, and scale.
Nimble’s mission is to invent autonomous logistics, everything from the warehouse floor to the consumer’s door, using AI robotics to enable the fastest, most efficient, and most sustainable supply chains.
Nimble’s board of directors includes AI and robotics pioneers Fei-Fei Li (former Chief Scientist of AI at Google), Marc Raibert (Founder and Chairman of Boston Dynamics), and Sebastian Thrun (Founder of Google X and Waymo).
For more information about Nimble, visit www.nimble.ai
