Ultra Raises $62M for Warehouse Robots-as-a-Service Fleet

Ultra, a Brooklyn startup that rents warehouse robots by the month instead of selling them, has pulled together $62 million, Fortune reported. The money is a $50 million Series A led by Framework Ventures with Y Combinator participating, on top of an earlier $12 million seed led by Y Combinator and Next View.

The division of labor with its AI partner is explicit. "Ultra builds and installs the robots, but relies on Physical Intelligence to supply the AI that allows them to learn and improve rapidly in response to any given customer's set-up," Fortune writes. Physical Intelligence, the robot-AI firm founded by a team out of Google DeepMind, carries a $5.6 billion valuation.

The commercial model is a monthly bill. Clients pay "an up-front integration fee for Ultra to install the robots, and then an ongoing monthly fee for ongoing hardware and software support." CEO Jon Miller Schwartz told Fortune that traction has let Ultra raise prices.

What is running in production is a stationary dual-arm robot Ultra calls Operator, or OP1, one of the fleet-learning stories on our robotics beat this week. The company says its robots have packed more than 500,000 orders across U.S. sites, with deployments in New York, Georgia, New Jersey and Texas, and at Highline Commerce in Brooklyn they handle up to 30% of fulfillment volume.

Schwartz pitches this as a counterweight to the humanoid wave. Fixed industrial systems, he told Fortune, "are having more real-world impact than humanoid robots, which receive most of the attention." Physical Intelligence's own π0.6 model, in a demo video, "reached 96.4% autonomy during an eight-hour shift" in a warehouse. The reporting puts no dollar figure on Ultra's revenue and no count on installed robots.