Mytra, a company that says its supercharging industrial productivity with first-of-its-kind three-dimensional robotics, launched with $78 million in total financing through the Series B stage and several commercial partners, including Albertsons Companies.
Founded by ex-Tesla and Rivian robotics and manufacturing leaders, the company aims to automate the most common industrial task: moving and storing material.
Clean slate approach dramatically simplifies warehouse operations
Recent advances in actuation, controls, AI and rapid prototyping have enabled robotics to automate much of the material workflow and fulfill the promise of software applied to the physical environment. Mytra has assembled a team of leaders to tackle this problem and reduce hardware complexity by orders of magnitude compared to the status quo, delivering a universal system to address the common but critical industry task of moving material.
“Material flow makes up the lion's share of the work in a warehouse but is still largely done the same way it was a century ago,” said Chris Walti, co-founder and CEO at Mytra. “This is because the alternatives are too complex, have too many parts, and are customized for specific applications. We're taking a radically different approach by reducing the number of parts and moving the focus from hardware to software.
Mytra systems are customizable, shapeable, scalable and high-density, allowing them to automate complex pallet and case handling without the complexity of forklifts, pallet jacks, conveyors, elevators and other automation. This simplicity is enabled by three key breakthroughs, according to the company:
- Simplified offering: Unlike other offerings that involve thousands of parts and saddle customers with technical debt, Mytra comprises only three individual components: bots, a simple and repeating matrix structure and edge-intelligent software, which simplifies the deployment process, reduces cost and avoids single points of failure.
- 3D movement: Mytra is the first system that allows for full 3D movement at up to 3,000 pounds from any cell to any adjacent cell in any direction. This achieves the physics-limited maximum level of flexibility.
- Software: Mytra’s software platform optimizes bot routes, manages inventory and continuously learns and improves, adjusting to changing customer needs. This approach entirely abstracts the hardware layer and makes material flow fully software-defined, allowing operators to unlock endless new applications and future-proof their operations.
Accelerating warehouse efficiency and productivity
Mytra’s founding team brings expertise in hardware, software and operations from companies like Tesla, Rivian, Stitch Fix, Walmart and Slack. Walti, who, prior to Mytra, led the Optimus Humanoid Bot team along with robotics and warehouse logistics at Tesla, founded Mytra alongside Ahmad Baitalmal, who led factory software at Tesla and Rivian. The company was born out of the Venture Equity (VE) team at Eclipse.
Mytra is backed by several investors, including
- Greenoaks, who led the company’s Series B
- Eclipse, who led the previous seed and Series A rounds, in addition to co-founder and chairman of Okta Frederic Kerrest’s 515 Ventures
- Individual investors, including Garry Tan and Lachy Groom, among individual and corporate partners.
“Warehouses are the backbone of the global economy,” said Neil Shah, Partner at Greenoaks. “Yet the vast majority of the world’s warehouses remain manual, and even those that are automated remain too complex and too rigid to meet the challenges of modern supply chains. By creating a software-defined automation system, Mytra breaks the trade-off between automation and flexibility, abstracting away the complexity of hardware, increasing density, dramatically boosting throughput and delivering a resilient system that can adapt as quickly as the needs of customers change.”
Scaling to meet global demand
With its new funding, Mytra will continue to grow its team, scale its technology to meet growing customer demand and deploy its next generation of systems to the largest blue-chip companies to automate applications that today remain highly manual and labor-intensive.
“Several factors have contributed to an inflection point in the robotics industry that will result in a boom in productivity in the physical world,” said Seth Winterroth, partner at Eclipse, who led Mytra’s Series A and participated in its Series B fundraising. “The stage is set for the stacked Mytra team: a massive market in desperate need of transformation and the opportunity to realize the benefits of converging tech trends that are making it possible to build automated robotics solutions.”
Mytra’s system is already deployed in production at select Albertsons Cos. distribution centers, where it buffers and sequences inventory prior to shipping to stores. Across its customer base, Mytra estimates that warehouses save up to 88% of labor hours and experience double the internal rate of return compared with current best-in-class technologies on the market.
“Mytra’s automation system offers unique flexibility to address many different applications using the same hardware,” said Mustafa Harcar, vice president of supply chain automation at Albertsons Cos. “Mytra’s highly simplified approach has the potential to unlock new levels of efficiency, with the confidence that the system can adapt to future needs.”
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