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The robot takeover is upon us. Fresh off another $50 million funding round, Locus Robotics, a unicorn company that makes autonomous mobile robots (AMR) for fulfillment warehouses, is acquiring Waypoint Robotics, another industry leader in AMRs.
- The deal will strengthen Locus’s e-comm, case-picking, and pallet-picking operations and tools. (Terms were not disclosed.)
Bot boom: The future of robotic automation will be “driven by the explosion of online ordering and supply-chain challenges and exacerbated by a significant—and growing—labor shortage,” Rick Faulk, CEO of Locus, told Retail Brew.
Locus’s Waypoint acquisition will help the company “respond nimbly to the volume spikes and growth currently becoming the norm,” Faulk added. And in a statement about the deal, Faulk said that it will “accelerate our ability to meet these global needs in just months rather than years.”
- Waypoint could help Locus boost productivity by 2x to 3x, Faulk claimed.
- Locus also recently signed a deal with DHL to digitize its supply chain by employing 2,000 bots in the logistics company’s 1,400+ global warehouses and offices.
Flashback: When we spoke to Brittain Ladd, chief supply chain and marketing officer for tech solutions provider KPI, about the rapid grocery delivery boom, he emphasized the need for automated fulfillment centers. “[These companies] will fail if [they] continue down the path of using small manually operated centers,” he told us. “If you invest in automation, you are guaranteed to have a much better opportunity in not only surviving, but thriving.”—JG