Robotics firm GreyOrange this week announced it has raised $110 million. The funding comes four years after a $140 million Series C that brought the Atlanta-based company’s raise to $170 million. Rather than the standard fundraising round, however, GreyOrange has opted for growth financing, largely backed by Mithril Capital Management, with support from BlackRock.
“Given our track record of performance, we were in the advantageous position of strategically selecting when and how to best fuel our continued growth,” Samay Kohli said of the decision to go through growth financing versus a more traditional fundraising round. “We chose a mix of equity and debt financing as the most effective structure for our growth plans and serving our customers.
The news follows reports from last year that the firm was looking to raise $500-600 million by way of an IPO. For now, however, the public listing has yet to materialize, so it seems to have gone back to the drawing board to raise additional capital.
“Success for us looks like solving big challenges in fulfillment for as many customers as possible globally,” Kohli tells TechCrunch. “We’re firmly focused on how we can deliver on surging demand from our customers as quickly and efficiently as possible. An IPO is certainly a viable option to make that happen in the future.”
Given the huge sums of money currently floating around in robotics, the timing certainly would have been right. Berkshire Grey, which operates in the same category, went public via SPAC last year — though share prices have since taken a massive hit.
GreyOrange, which specializes in warehouse/logistics robotics, was formed in India back in 2015. The company tells TechCrunch that it moved operations to Atlanta, Georgia three years later. There’s still plenty of growth left in the category, as more retailers search for ways to even the playing field against Amazon’s dominance. Notably, Walmart Canada announced in March that it was opening a $118 million fulfillment warehouse in Alberta outfitted with GreyOrange’s systems.
“As ecommerce sales soar, brands face a stark reality: embrace automation, or cede customers to the competition,” co-founder and CEO Samay Kohli said in a release. “We orchestrate fulfillment and optimize inventory in a complex global supply chain environment for more companies that ship millions of items each day than any other player in the market outside of Amazon.”
Much of the funding will go toward hiring, as the company looks to add an additional 300 roles in engineering, product, marketing and sales. Additional funding will go toward ramping up production and rollout of GreyOrange’s robotic systems.
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