Smart Robotics has completed a €10 million Series A funding round, led by Rotterdamse Havendraken, with support from Innovation Industries and the Dutch family office Ernij Next.
“We saw a significant gap in logistics automation,” says Co-CEO Felix Schmidt in a conversation with Tech Funding News, reflecting on the original vision of co-founder and Co-CEO Heico Sandee.
Operators are rethinking manual fulfilment due to labour shortages, rising e-commerce orders, and higher performance demands. Robotic pick-and-place, which means quickly identifying, grabbing, and sorting items, is still hard to do at scale due to differences in items, packaging, and workflows.
“Founders aimed to address this with robotic solutions that combine robotics and AI. Our goal was to create robots that are more intelligent and supportive to humans in production and warehouse environments,” Schmidt adds.
Founded in 2015 by Heico Sandee, Smart Robotics has built what it calls Europe’s top full-stack AI pick-and-place platform for intralogistics. Its main product is an AI control system that helps robots handle a wide range of products accurately and adapt to different warehouse settings.
The company says its systems run 99.5% of the time and can make up to 1,000 picks per hour, sometimes matching or beating human workers while running nonstop. Rather than selling standard robot arms, Smart Robotics offers complete robotic cells designed for specific logistics and production needs.
“We call ourselves embodied or physical AI because we combine the software tech stack with hardware. We believe in using specific robotic arms for specific tasks. It’s more important to tailor a robotic cell to the customer’s needs,” says Schmidt.
Smart Robotics stands out from traditional automation companies, such as Copal Handling Systems and Lowpad, due to its extensive data resources. The company has completed over one billion real-world robotic picks, making it the first European firm to reach this milestone and giving it what it calls the largest operational dataset in the industry.
“We have more than 120 robots deployed, and we are the only European company with a billion picks. This means we have over a billion live data points on how our robots operate and address customer challenges,” Schmidt notes.
Every pick helps improve the model, creating a feedback loop that can increase its lead over competitors. This accuracy affects shipping density, packaging use, and cost per order, all of which are important measures in high-volume e-commerce logistics.
“Their ability to leverage large‑scale operational data to continuously improve performance gives them a strong and defensible position in this rapidly growing market,” says Robin Slakhorst of Rotterdamse Havendraken.
Along with expanding its current item-picking and palletising products, Smart Robotics is developing its next product line. “One of our next goals in the coming years, besides growing sales and reaching more types of customers, is to launch another product line. It will probably be mixed case palletising, which is a complex job that many customers are now asking for,” Schmidt concludes.
