Dexory, a UK-based startup building autonomous robots for warehouses, has raised an $80m Series B round as it looks to expand in the US.
The round was made up of 70% equity and 30% debt, and takes the startup’s total equity funding to $120m.
DTCP, which spun out from Deutsche Telekom, led the round, with participation from Latitude Ventures, Wave-X and Bootstrap Europe, alongside existing investors Atomico, Lakestar and Capnamic. DTCP partner Michael Rager joined Dexory’s board of directors.
Earlier this year, the cofounder of autonomous vehicle startup Oxa told Sifted that recent developments in AI are ushering in a “revolution” for autonomous machines — and the same has happened on warehouse floors, says Dexory founder and CEO Andrei Danescu.
“Gen AI was really what allowed us to go over vast amounts of data very quickly,” he tells Sifted, pointing to how the startup’s tech can now make sense of tens of thousands of items that are typically housed in the average-sized warehouse.
Dexory launched its hardware and software as a commercial product in March 2023 — it was developing its technology for eight years before that — and now, it’s looking to scale operations in Europe and North America.
The world’s tallest autonomous robot
The startup has built an autonomous robot — the world’s tallest, according to Danescu, standing at 12m — and operating system that helps warehouses to keep track of and manage inventory.
The robot uses cameras and lidar sensors to take stock, before feeding that information into a platform that can suggest ways to make operations more efficient. Dexory is what Danescu calls “full stack”, meaning it manufactures the robots itself, has built the software and sells directly to the market.
There were two big drivers that persuaded investors to stump up cash for Dexory’s Series B, he says.
One was growing investor confidence in the autonomous space. Autonomous vehicle startup Wayve’s $1bn raise earlier this year was a big green light for the sector — and part of a wider trend of generalist investors looking more closely at deeptech deals.
While investment into European deeptech fell from the $19.4bn picked up in 2021 to $16.8bn last year, according to Dealroom, there’s only been a very gradual decline versus the region’s startups overall, which saw funding nearly halve between 2021 and 2023.
Next stop: the US
The other driver is Dexory’s own growth, says Danescu. The company’s autonomous robots and analytics platform are deployed in around 50 warehouses around the world, in a broad range of industries like third party logistics, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, car makers and aerospace. Customers include the likes of GE Appliances, DB Schenker and Maersk.
While he won’t share revenue numbers, he tells Sifted that the company has seen a 5-10x increase in the past 12 months. 60% of that currently comes from the UK and Europe, with the other 40% from the US.
To hit that scale, the company’s headcount has grown from 30 to around 130 in the past 16 months. He expects to grow that headcount by another 50% or more in the next year as the company looks to grow operations in the US.
“The US is one of the biggest markets in the logistics space,” says Danescu, adding he expects activity in the country to overtake Europe in terms of revenue in the next 12-18 months.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/ai-robots-dexory-80m-raise-news/
