Germany-based Sereact develops AI-powered robotics solutions that fully automate the pick-and-pack process in warehouses and manufacturing. In a recent development, the company has grabbed €25 million in Series A funding. This follows the $5 million seed funding raised back in 2023.
Who invested in Sereact?
The latest round was led by Creandum (which recently invested in Plancraft and nexos.ai), alongside significant participation from existing investors Point Nine and Air Street Capital. Prominent business angels, including former Formula 1 World Champion Nico Rosberg, Mehdi Ghissassi (ex Google DeepMind), Ott Kaukver (Skype), Lars Nordwall (ex neo4j), Torsten Reil and Niklas Köhler (both Helsing) also contributed to this round.
What’s next for the company?
It plans to further accelerate the deployment of its pioneering Vision Language Action Models (VLAM) to robotics. The new funding will be used to expand R&D efforts to support additional robot hardware platforms, such as mobile robots and humanoids, as well as to develop solutions for more complex tasks beyond logistics and manufacturing. Sereact will also expand its US presence via partnerships and expanding its local team.
Role of robotics in warehouses
Robotics is the next frontier for AI, as improved models and inference enable machines to handle increasingly sophisticated tasks and learn to adapt to their environments without constant customisation.
Robots equipped with advanced AI can seamlessly pick and pack items in e-commerce warehouses, handling fragile or irregularly shaped products. In logistics, they can autonomously sort goods, conduct quality checks, automate inventory management, and optimise workflows, reducing delays. This has huge potential to drive productivity, address labour shortages, and even create new industries.
This is where Sereact plays a major role by commercialising a new era of intelligent warehouse robots.
Builds embodied AI for robots
Sereact was founded by Ralf Gulde and Marc Tuscher in 2021 in Stuttgart, Germany. It develops AI-powered robotics solutions that are deployed across various industries and use cases for major customers in the US and Europe. Its AI software equips robots with general purpose visual and manipulation capabilities, enabling them to perceive their environment and devise intelligent strategies to perform a wide range of physical tasks.
From precise handling of individual objects to tackling complex logistics and manufacturing processes, the systems analyse and solve unfamiliar situations in real time. This allows for anomaly detection, process optimisation, and the setting of new standards in flexibility and efficiency for autonomous systems.
Sreact’s PickGPT
The company was the first to combine zero-shot visual reasoning, which enables robots to perform tasks they have not been explicitly trained on, with natural language instruction via chat so that non-technical users can operate them on-site. This capability, called PickGPT, works with the same technology that underpins ChatGPT.
It is touted to be the 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, which helps 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.
Starting with warehouse automation, Sereact has experienced rapid commercial adoption with customers, including BMW, Daimler Truck, Bol and Active Ants. This real-world deployment of its products creates a real-time data flywheel from which Sereact systems learn to continually improve far beyond systems trained primarily on synthetic data.
“With our technology, robots act situationally rather than following rigidly programmed sequences. They adapt to dynamic tasks in real-time, enabling an unprecedented level of autonomy,” said Ralf Gulde, CEO and co-founder of Sereact.
“Most AI robotics companies are currently hardware-first. What sets Sereact apart is their software-first, foundational approach which means they have the potential to become the brain of any robot that requires vision and autonomous capabilities. The opportunities here are endless and it’s great to see this kind of innovation coming from Europe,” said Johan Brenner, general partner at Creandum.
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