AI Warehouse Startup Smart Robotics Raises €10M in New Funding

Smart Robotics claims one billion real-world robotic picks, says its AI platform can handle up to 1,000 items per hour in high-mix logistics environments

Smart Robotics, a Dutch embodied AI company that builds robotic pick-and-place systems for warehouses, has closed a €10 million Series A funding round led by Rotterdamse Havendraken, with Innovation Industries and Dutch family office Ernij Next also participating, the company disclosed this week.

The Eindhoven-based company said it will use the proceeds to expand deployments with warehouse operators and third-party logistics providers across Europe, hire commercial and technical staff, and advance research into perception and grasping algorithms for mixed-SKU bin environments, where robots must identify and handle thousands of distinct product shapes and weights without pre-programmed instructions. 

Smart Robotics, founded in 2015 by Heico Sandee, describes its offering as a full-stack AI control platform layered over purpose-built robotic cells. Rather than selling standard robot arms, the company designs complete systems tailored to each customer’s workflow, integrating its proprietary software with third-party hardware. 

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The company claims its systems maintain 99.5% uptime and can process up to 1,000 picks per hour, figures it says match or exceed human throughput while operating continuously. It says it has logged more than 1 billion real-world robotic picks across more than 120 deployed systems, making it the largest operational dataset of its kind among European intralogistics automation firms.

That dataset has strategic weight. Each completed pick generates training data that feeds back into the AI control layer, compounding accuracy over time and widening the performance gap with competitors using smaller operational footprints. The dynamic matters in high-volume e-commerce fulfillment, where errors affect shipping density, packaging efficiency, and cost per order.

Robin Slakhorst of Rotterdamse Havendraken said in the company’s announcement that the firm’s capacity to leverage large-scale operational data to improve performance gives it “a strong and defensible position in this rapidly growing market.” 

The move comes as European logistics operators face mounting structural pressure. Labor shortages, rising e-commerce order volumes, and growing SKU complexity have accelerated demand for flexible automation that can handle irregular, unpredictable items, a task that older, rules-based robotic systems handle poorly. Robotic pick-and-place has long been identified as one of the hardest unsolved problems in warehouse automation at commercial scale. 

Co-founder Sandee said in remarks published by tech.eu that the company’s differentiation stems from combining proprietary AI software, deployment experience, and a multidisciplinary team across AI, robotics, and logistics.

Separately, the company said it is developing a mixed-case palletizing product line, a process that involves assembling outbound pallets with varied carton types as its next commercial offering. Co-CEO Felix Schmidt said the feature addresses a category that customers have increasingly requested. 

Disclaimer: This news is based on publicly available information. NervNow has not independently verified any claims.

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