Warehouse robotics startup Ultra raised $62 million across two financings, Fortune reports: a $50 million Series A led by Framework Ventures with participation from Y Combinator, plus an earlier $12 million seed round led by Y Combinator and NextView. The Brooklyn company also announced a deeper partnership with robot-AI developer Physical Intelligence.
Ultra's OP1 Operator is a stationary robot built for warehouse packing, sorting and kitting. RuntimeWire reports that, according to Ultra, the machine can be installed in hours, runs from a standard 120-volt outlet and fits into a roughly 5-by-5-foot footprint. Its work area extends up to 10 by 10 feet, with a stated payload limit of 10 pounds.
Rather than requiring customers to buy the robots outright, Ultra charges an upfront integration fee followed by monthly hardware and software support fees. Co-founder and CEO Jon Miller Schwartz told Fortune that the model has generated significant revenue and allowed the company to raise prices, though he did not disclose a revenue figure. Ultra says its robots have packed more than 500,000 orders in U.S. warehouses.
The Physical Intelligence partnership splits the work between Ultra's hardware and customer deployments and Physical Intelligence's robot models. RuntimeWire says that, in a February account of the collaboration, Physical Intelligence reported one of its models ran an Ultra robot packing customer orders for a full shift at 96.4% autonomy. People stepped in when the model stumbled, completing orders while generating data for further training. That partner-reported result describes one deployment, not every Ultra robot or warehouse workflow.
