Mytra, the company supercharging industrial productivity with first-of-its-kind three-dimensional robotics, has 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 will automate the most common industrial task: moving and storing material.
85 percent of global GDP is attributed to physical goods according to analysis from Eclipse, and more than half of all the work in making and delivering those goods to customers involves moving material.
Although moving material is so pervasive and critical to the economy, the current process in warehouses and manufacturing facilities has changed very little in 50 years.
Unprecedented pressures on manufacturing and supply chain, in addition to rapidly growing labor shortages, have made it clear that the legacy way of operating warehouses – with people and forklifts – needs to change.
Clean slate approach dramatically simplifies warehouse operations
Recent advances in actuation, controls, AI, and rapid prototyping have enabled robotics to finally automate much of the material workflow and fulfill the promise of software applied to the physical environment.
Mytra has assembled a team of leaders uniquely qualified 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. This is because the alternatives are too complex, have too many parts, and are customized for specific applications,” said Chris Walti, co-founder and CEO at Mytra.
“We’re taking a radically different approach by reducing the number of parts and moving the focus from hardware to software.
“We are the first and only solution that can universally automate many of the most labor-intensive, costly, and complex aspects of material flow, which are the ‘red blood cells’ of any industrial operation.
“Mytra enables infinite ways to move, store, and retrieve materials, changing applications instantly — all of which are controlled by software.
“This will drive massive efficiencies not only within warehouses but also in adjacent transportation and manufacturing operations.”
Mytra systems are infinitely 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 radical simplicity is enabled by three key breakthroughs:
Simplified offering: Unlike other solutions 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 3000 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, which partners with world-class founders to catalyze new businesses and accelerate their growth.
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, and individual investors, Garry Tan, Lachy Groom, among other 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.
“By making best-in-class automation available to all, we believe that Chris and his team will define the next generation of modern warehousing – and we are thrilled to partner with them for years to come.”
Scaling to meet global demand
With its new funding, Mytra will continue to grow its world-class team, scale its technology to meet the 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.
“I have no doubt that the Mytra team can – and will – build an iconic full stack company that will redefine the supply chain industry.”
Mytra’s system is already deployed in production at select Albertsons Cos.’s 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 percent 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.”
