About Locus Robotics
Locus Robotics was founded in 2014 by Bruce Welty and Rick Faulk, based on experience Welty had gained running a separate e-commerce fulfillment business, where he directly observed how much time warehouse workers spent walking between different storage locations to manually pick items for customer orders, a labor-intensive process that represents one of the largest cost and time components of e-commerce order fulfillment, motivating the development of a robotics solution that could reduce this walking time without requiring the enormous capital investment and facility redesign that some more comprehensive warehouse automation systems require.
Locus's core product is a fleet of autonomous mobile robots that navigate a warehouse and travel to specific storage locations, where a human worker then picks the physical item and places it onto the robot, which then transports the item to a packing station, rather than requiring the human worker to walk to each pick location and back themselves, an approach the company calls "collaborative" robotics since it augments and speeds up human workers' picking process rather than attempting to fully automate the physical picking task itself, which remains technically difficult for robots to perform reliably across the enormous variety of product shapes, sizes, and packaging found in a typical e-commerce warehouse. This collaborative approach has let Locus's robots be deployed relatively quickly within existing warehouse facilities without requiring the extensive facility redesign, racking system replacement, or major capital investment that some more comprehensive automated storage and retrieval systems require, making Locus's technology attractive to warehouse operators seeking meaningful efficiency improvements without a complete warehouse automation overhaul. The company's customers span e-commerce, retail, and third-party logistics companies operating high-volume order fulfillment warehouses. Locus Robotics has raised very substantial venture funding from investors including Tiger Global, Zebra Technologies, and Prologis Ventures, reaching unicorn status, competing with other warehouse robotics providers including 6 River Systems (owned by Ocado) and various automated storage and retrieval system providers.
