Maersk’s VC arm backs inventory drone startup Verity with $32 million
Danish container carrier had recently rolled out the flying bots in its North American warehouses.
Warehouse drone startup Verity AG will accelerate the rollout of its autonomous, flying, inventory-counting robots thanks to $32 million in venture capital announced this week.
The news comes just weeks after Zurich-based Verity said that the maritime containership giant A.P. Moller – Maersk had chosen its drones to manage inventory counts in its North American warehouse network.
Apparently the Danish container carrier has been so happy with those early results that it has also chosen to provide financial backing for the nine-year-old tech firm. Verity’s “series B” round was led by A.P. Moller Holding, with participation from Exor Ventures and existing and new investors. And despite the firm’s young age, it boasts deep experience: Verity founder and CEO Raffaello D’Andrea co-founded Kiva Systems, which was acquired by Amazon in 2012 and rebranded as Amazon Robotics.
According to Verity, inventory management is a prime use case for automation, since manual inventory scanning is costly and laborious, and errors frequently lead to lost productivity and sales. In contrast, flying drones can do the same job automatically, running in the dark when workers aren’t in the building, and do not require an operator.
Verity says its systems are being used by client in the third party logistics (3PL), manufacturing, and retail spaces, with a combined footprint of over 1,500 warehouses including installations in 30 sites across 13 countries on 3 continents.