Pick-and-pack contributes to nearly 55% of the cost of running a warehouse, at a time when operators are facing the twin pressures of rising labor costs and growing demand driven by e-commerce. However, businesses looking to automate pick-and-pack have historically had to work with inflexible systems, with long training periods, that struggle with changing product ranges and require significant human oversight.
Germany-based Sereact is building AI-powered software that fully automates the pick-and-pack process in warehouses and manufacturing. Its solution can be deployed within a single day and result in immediate cost savings of up to 77% per pick.
Plans to roll out its solution!
Now, the advanced robotics solutions from Germany has raised $5 million in seed funding in a round led by Point Nine and Air Street Capital. Angel investors in the round include Alexander Diehl; Oliver Cameron (VP Product of Cruise, Co-Founder of Voyage); the Founders of Proglove and OMA Ventures; Achim Baier and Wolfgang Frank (Arconsis); Martin Giese; Michael Achtelik, Jan Stumpf and Daniel Gurdan (Founders of Ascending Technologies); Mostafa Elsayed (CEO and Co-Founder of Automata).
Sereact will use the proceeds of the seed round to expand its interdisciplinary team and to support the development and international roll-out of PickGPT.
Ralf Gulde, Co-Founder and CEO of Sereact said: “By combining large language models and robotics, Sereact has created the world’s most accessible way of interacting with robots. Today’s milestone will accelerate our mission of using fully autonomous robotics to overcome labor shortages, fix supply chains and boost productivity.”
Nathan Benaich, Founding Partner at Air Street Capital said: “As businesses embrace automation, they’ll need accessible technology that’s capable of handling challenging and unpredictable real-world environments. The team at Sereact combines a deep understanding of the warehouse operating context with real technical ingenuity. As the first business to turn the combination of LLMs and pick-and-pack from an academic possibility to real-world impact, they’re building a product that’s still only scratching the surface of its potential use cases.”
Ricardo Sequerra Amram, a Partner at Point Nine said: “Sereact brings a new paradigm to AI and robotics. By combining vision transformers and LLMs their solution is fast to deploy, easy to configure and provides the critical service level required by demanding industries like logistics and manufacturing. The research done by Ralf and Marc during their time in academia is now applied to commercial use-cases and is currently in production in live environments with top enterprise customers.”
PickGPT: All you need to know
Founded by Marc Tuscher and Ralf Gulde in 2021 in Stuttgart, Germany, Sereact has created an adaptable AI in order to commercialise a new era of intelligent robots. It has advanced AI-powered robotics solutions, automating warehouse processes in a practical, user-friendly way. Its PickGPT is the first commercially-available robotics transformer that enables robots to understand natural language and perceive their environment with an unprecedented level of intelligence and accuracy. It works with the same technology that underpins ChatGPT.
Its latest offering – PickGPT is the world’s easiest tool for instructing and programming robots. By allowing users to guide robots entirely through natural language, it prioritises simplicity and user-friendliness. Leveraging an LLM trained on massive amounts of text data makes interactions easier and enables complex reasoning and planning. It enables the robot to understand what the user is asking for, how it relates to its visual input, and how it should act.
Unlike traditional models, PickGPT uses zero-shot planning. This enables it to calculate and execute sequences of actions to achieve a target state even in complex, dynamic, and unstructured environments without prior specific training. In unforeseen situations, it is able to adapt its strategy until an action is successful.
The company has achieved technological milestones such as industry-leading picking speeds of 1500 picks per hour, collision-free picking with any gripper, and fully autonomous object manipulation. Currently, Sereact is trusted by partners across the e-commerce, manufacturing, and third-party logistics sectors, serving industry leaders like ZenFulfillment, Daimler Truck, Material Bank, and Schmalz.
