Kiva Robots, bought by Amazon in 2012 for $775M…
6 River Robots bought by Shopify in 2019 for $450M, with $30M in expected revenue in 2020…
A smart buy for Shopify, but the technology is an expensive babysitter for a picker. You don’t get the same storage density that you do with Kiva robots, and you really aren’t reducing your work force if you have to have a picker with each robot.
Long term, pairing 6 River robots with a robotic picking arm like Nimble AI will be a game changer for a lot of facilities. A warehouse can get rid of most of its pickers, and have the robots work in a facility that is laid out to support both people and robots at the same time.
(Nimble AI is a robotics company founded out of the artificial intelligence labs at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon.)
Next up: reducing the cost and footprint of this warehouse automation, so it can be exported to other countries. Where do you see non-US opportunities for logistics robots? Please visit my office hours and continue this conversation.