Last year, Dexterity came out of stealth and I shared that we were proud to have led the Seed round and partner with the company from Day 1. Today, I am even more excited to share that we recently led their Series B round in the company along with our friends from Kleiner Perkins. Here’s why!
As commerce is moving online and becoming more and more global, and as consumer spending is ballooning, we are seeing a rapid increase in the movement of goods around the world. We’ve never seen anything like it before. Customer expectations are also increasing along with the spending. Customers today order goods online from a different part of the world and expect them to be delivered in 1–2 days. Covid further accelerated this trend in the last 18 months.
As a result, the global supply chain is under extreme stress and disruption, which some fear has the potential to slow down global GDP growth.
One of the key nodes in the modern supply chain is a warehouse. We’re building new warehouses as fast as we can to keep up with the demand. According to CBRE, the total warehouse space under construction grew from just 50M square feet in 2013 to 250M square feet in 2019. But that is not nearly enough, we will need another 330 million square feet of warehouse space by 2025 just to keep pace with the expected uptick in e-commerce sales.
Naturally, the demand for workers is rising every year but jobs are hard to fill. It’s because warehouse jobs are painful and have limited growth prospects. The warehouse industry is facing a massive labor shortage with almost 500k open jobs across the US with turnover rates of 40%+ and growing. All these problems are only going to significantly increase in the coming years.
The intersection of these polarized trends presents a unique opportunity to simultaneously address the labor shortage and fulfill rapidly increasing warehouse orders. This has resulted in a massive demand from companies to deploy warehouse automation solutions. A major portion of the tasks in a warehouse involve some sort of dexterous pick-and-place and because tasks in a warehouse are semi-structured/unstructured, they have been extremely hard to automate historically. The search for an autonomous dexterous pick-and-place solution has been ongoing for a long time with limited success.
Strategic leaders have realized that robotic automation of warehouses is not just a nice-to-have, but existential to their business long-term. Leaders who are taking definitive steps in this direction will build a sustainable advantage over their competitors.
Enter Dexterity — A company that is revolutionizing warehouses by empowering robots with the intelligence to pick, pack, move, and collaborate for the most complex material handling tasks
In less than four years since our seed investment in Dexterity, the company has exceeded our expectations on pretty much all fronts and has quietly become a pioneer at driving pick-and-place robot transformation. Dexterity not only solved that challenging problem for warehouses but is also doing it at production-grade — driving ROI and doing so reliably. Their robots are already delivering on their transformational promise with customers in retail, consumer goods manufacturing, and logistics. So far they’ve picked over 15 million goods in production, and that number grows daily.
Unsurprisingly, the company is getting customer interest beyond our wildest expectations. The company’s full-stack approach, combined with minimal installation timelines and costs has meant that warehouses in need of automation support are able to get started almost immediately. It became clear that the market opportunity and customer demand are much more than we originally anticipated and that the company needs to scale faster to make the most of this opportunity. So when Samir decided to raise Series B, we knew we needed to double down!
With this new round of funding, Dexterity is aggressively expanding the team across functions. So if you’re looking to work for a generational company go check out http://www.dexterity.ai
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