Sereact Raises $5 Million to Democratize AI Robotics

Sereact, the Stuttgart-based provider of advanced robotics solutions, announced its $5 million Seed funding today led by Point Nine and Air Street Capital.

Sereact is building AI-powered software that fully automates the pick-and-pack process in warehouses and manufacturing. Pick-and-pack contributes approximately 55% of the cost of running a warehouse, at a time when operators are facing the twin pressures of rising labor costs and growing demand driven by e-commerce. 

However, businesses looking to automate pick-and-pack have historically had to work with inflexible systems, with long training periods, that struggle with changing product ranges and require significant human oversight. Sereact’s solution can be deployed within a single day and result in immediate cost-savings of up to 77% per pick.

Sereact’s latest offering, PickGPT, combines their patented work in computer vision with large language models, the technology underpinning ChatGPT. PickGPT is the first commercially-available robotics transformer that enables robots to understand natural language and perceive their environment with an unprecedented level of intelligence and accuracy. This democratizes access to robotics by allowing users with no technical expertise to instruct and debug the system in a simple chatbot interface.

Ralf Gulde, Co-Founder and CEO of Sereact said: “By combining large language models and robotics, Sereact has created the world’s most accessible way of interacting with robots. Today’s milestone will accelerate our mission of using fully autonomous robotics to overcome labor shortages, fix supply chains and boost productivity.”

With the combination of Artificial Intelligence and robotics, Sereact has brought to life a new era of intelligence, precision, and efficiency in logistics. Since its founding in 2021, the company achieved technological milestones such as industry-leading picking speeds of 1500 picks per hour, collision-free picking with any gripper, and fully autonomous object manipulation. Today, Sereact is trusted by partners across the e-commerce, manufacturing, and third-party logistics sectors, serving industry leaders like ZenFulfillment, Daimler Truck, Material Bank, and Schmalz.

Sereact will use the proceeds of the seed round to expand its interdisciplinary team and to support the development and international roll-out of PickGPT.

Nathan Benaich, Founding Partner at Air Street Capital said: “As businesses embrace automation, they’ll need accessible technology that’s capable of handling challenging and unpredictable real-world environments. The team at Sereact combines a deep understanding of the warehouse operating context with real technical ingenuity. As the first business to turn the combination of LLMs and pick-and-pack from an academic possibility to real-world impact, they’re building a product that’s still only scratching the surface of its potential use cases.”

Ricardo Sequerra Amram, a Partner at Point Nine said: “Sereact brings a new paradigm to AI and robotics. By combining vision transformers and LLMs their solution is fast to deploy, easy to configure and provides the critical service level required by demanding industries like logistics and manufacturing. The research done by Ralf and Marc during their time in academia is now applied to commercial use-cases and is currently in production in live environments with top enterprise customers.”

In addition to Air Street Capital and Point Nine, existing and new angels are also participating. These include Alexander Diehl; Oliver Cameron (VP Product of Cruise, Co-Founder of Voyage); the Founders of Proglove and OMA Ventures; Achim Baier and Wolfgang Frank (arconsis); Martin Giese; Michael Achtelik, Jan Stumpf and Daniel Gurdan (Founders of Ascending Technologies); Mostafa Elsayed (CEO and Co-Founder of Automata).