The news: Sereact, a German warehouse robotics company, said Zalando has joined its Series B as a strategic investor. The round now totals $116 million. Headline led the original $110 million raise. Sereact has raised more than $145 million to date.
What Sereact does: The company sells software, not robots. Its system, Cortex, is a hardware agnostic “brain” that runs the same AI model across different robot bodies. It can run single arm picking cells, dual arm stations for sorting returns, and humanoid robots. Warehouses can run the software on robots they already own.
Sereact says Cortex is already operating at scale:
More than 200 systems live across Europe
Over a billion real picks completed
About one pick in 53,000 needs a human to step in
Why Zalando: Fashion retailers deal with high return rates, making returns one of the most labor intensive warehouse tasks. Nearly one in five online orders in the US is returned. Sereact says its per-item pricing model cuts returns handling costs by about 30% compared with manual work.
“Companies that focus on operational excellence believe in our technologies,” said CEO Ralf Gulde.
The customers: Sereact names Daimler Truck, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Rohlik, and Austrian Post among its customers. It opened its first US office in Boston this summer, and calls further North American expansion a priority.
The backdrop: The round adds to a wave of warehouse and factory robotics funding this summer, including rounds for NEURA Robotics and Standard Bots. Most of those bets are on robot hardware or humanoids. Sereact and its backers argue the software layer is the harder moat.
What's next: Sereact says the new money funds Cortex 2.0, a version that plans a move and tests it against a model of the physics before the robot acts.
