Ambi Robotics had already raised $26 million in a Series A round in September 2021. But after spending most of the 2022 deploying 80 robotic sortation systems for e-commerce logistics firm Pitney Bowes, investors like Tiger Global Management wondered if it couldn’t grow even faster with more funding. 

CEO Jim Liefer thought about building the offer into a new round, but with ample cash on the books and the specter of peak holiday shipping season ahead, he decided not to risk the time and attention. So what started as an update presentation to existing investors and customers, turned into $32 million in additional investment. 

“It’s chilly out there,” said Liefer of the general climate for venture capital. “But this time it happened very fast. “

The extra funds will allow Ambi to have more parts, manufacturing capacity, and engineers at the ready to speed up deployments with its largest customer while still being able to work with new customers on customizations. 

Ambi’s hero product is a package sorting station. A robotic arm grabs packages out of a bin and reads the label, then regroups the packages based on their destination so that they can be handed off to last-mile delivery carriers efficiently. 

Sorting packages used to be exclusively the job of the big national carriers like UPS, FedEx, and USPS, but in recent years new players as well as Amazon and other  retailers have gotten into doing it themselves. If they pre-sort their packages, they can sometimes save money on shipping and gain more control over the fulfillment and delivery process. 

“The market is getting much bigger, ” Liefer told Insider. 

Sortation operations run the gambit in terms of automation, from manual processes in small warehouses to high-tech operations in vast buildings using fast-moving conveyor belts. Ambi’s solution is somewhere in between. It doesn’t require the labor of a manual operation, but it’s also a lighter lift in terms of installation than filling a building with conveyors. 

Here’s the 15-page deck that helped Ambi Robotics soup up its ability to get robots in warehouses for this holiday shipping season: