Photoneo Brightpick Group Raises $19M to Complete $40M Series B for E-Commerce, Grocery Fulfillment

Photoneo Brightpick Group yesterday announced that it has raised an additional $19 million to complete its $40 million Series B round. The company plans to use the new funding primarily for new installations of Brightpick’s warehouse automation in the U.S.

“We are seeing extremely strong interest from existing and new customers for Brightpick’s solution because it helps customers cut operating costs and eliminate labor challenges, two relevant concerns in today’s tough economic environment,” said Jan Zizka, CEO and co-founder of Photoneo Brightpick Group. “These new funds will help us accelerate the pace of deployment of our solution and scale our US presence.”

Photoneo Brightpick Group is the parent company of Photoneo s.r.o., a Bratislava, Slovakia-based provider of vision sensors and intelligence software, and Brightpick, an Erlanger, Ky.-based provider of automation for e-commerce and grocery order fulfillment.

The group said it has more than 300 employees and is used in over 5,000 technology installations across the U.S., Europe and Asia. Its customers include leading companies such as General Motors, Volkswagen, and KUKA. Currently, the U.S. accounts for approximately 25% of Photoneo Brightpick Group’s revenue.

Photoneo Brightpick promises speedy deployment

Brightpick said its robots autonomously pick, consolidate, and dispatch orders in large, small, and micro-fulfillment centers. The company claimed that its end-to-end system takes less than a month to deploy, enables warehouses to reduce their picking labor by 95%, and cuts costs for order fulfillment by half.

Brightpick has been actively rolling out its warehouse automation in Europe, including with Rohlik Group, one of Europe’s largest online grocers, with over 10 million orders per year and 1 million customers. Rohlik recently used Brightpick to automate order fulfillment and dispatch in its Prague fulfillment center (see video at bottom of article).

The company said it expects to announce a next-generation automated order-picking system using proprietary machine vision and artificial intelligence in the first quarter of 2023. Photoneo said it has developed the world’s highest-resolution and highest-accuracy 3D camera.

Investors expect growth

Taiwania Capital led Photoneo Brightpick's latest round, which also included follow-on investments by prior Series B lead investors IPM Group and Alpha Intelligence Capital.

“Photoneo Brightpick Group has strong leadership, talented engineers, and world-class technology that will fundamentally change how online retailers and grocers do order fulfillment in the future,” said Mitch Yang, managing partner at Taiwania Capital.

“We look forward to working closely with them in this high-growth phase,” he said. “In addition, we believe our connections to Taiwan’s ICT [information and communications technology] sectors could add great value to this partnership.”

Additional investors in this round include H&D Asset Management, Venture to Future Fund, and Kolowrat Group. Photoneo Brightpick said the Series B round brings its total capital raised since inception to $53 million.