Locus Robotics secures $25m for warehouse robots
American startup Locus Robotics has raised $25m in a series B funding round. The funds will be used to support the expansion of Locus' fleet of warehouse robots. The company uses a subscription model called "Robots-as-a-Service" (RaaS), allowing customers to hire their technology without making a large capital investment. The company was created to provide an alternative service for former customers of robotics company Kiva Systems, which stopped servicing its existing user base in 2015 after being acquired and renamed by Amazon.

Locus Robotics, a Wilmington, MA-based startup, raised $25 million in a Series B funding led by Silicon Valley Scale Venture Partners, with additional participation from existing investors. Locus plans to use the funds to expand into international markets and build up its growing subscription-based robot fleet. Locus business model uses Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) which allows customers to use Locus’ solutions without a large-scale capital investment.

The story of how Locus came to be is almost as interesting as to why their mobile robots and RaaS business mode are getting so much attention and acceptance.

In March 2012, in an effort to make their distribution centers (DCs) as efficient as possible, Amazon acquired Kiva Systems for $775 million and almost immediately took them in-house. There was a year of confusion after the acquisition whether Kiva would continue providing DCs with Kiva robots. It became clear that Amazon was taking all Kiva’s production and that, at some future date, Kiva would stop supporting their existing client base and focus entirely on Amazon – which happened in April 2015 when Amazon renamed Kiva to Amazon Robotics and encouraged prospective users of Kiva technology to let Amazon Robotics and Amazon Services provide fulfillment within Amazon warehouses using Amazon robots.

Locus Robotics came to be because its founders were early adopters of Kiva Systems robotics technology. When they couldn’t expand with Kiva because Kiva had been taken off the market by Amazon, they were inspired to engineer a system they thought better and which empowered human pickers with mobile robots. The Locus mobile robot and related software are their solutions.