Fetch Robotics Inc. is announcing early Wednesday that it has raised $25 million in a new funding aimed at meeting accelerating demand for its warehouse robots.

The San Jose, California-based company is one of the leaders of a new army of “collaborative robots” that work closely alongside humans — in Fetch’s case, mostly in warehouses, factories and distribution centers run by logistics companies such as DHL International GmbH (video below).

Fetch Chief Executive Melonee Wise is one of the latter-day pioneers of robots that have begun getting used in practical situations. Fetch advertises its line of Freight “autonomous mobile robots” as “real robots doing real work with real people in the real world.” Indeed, Dan Kara, research director for robotics at ABI Research, said most of the growth in robotics is in commercial and industrial uses, not consumer applications.

The Series B round was led by San Francisco-based Sway Ventures, along with existing investors O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Shasta Ventures and SoftBank’s SB Group US, bringing total funding to date to $48 million.

Wise told SiliconANGLE that the 72-person company is seeing accelerating demand thanks to rampant growth in ecommerce, which requires ever more and larger warehouses and distribution centers. A key attraction of warehouses and the like for Fetch is that there’s at least a 600,000-person shortage of workers in logistics and manufacturing, Wise has said.

“There’s kind of a perfect storm happening right now,” Wise said, as consumers demand faster deliveries of orders at the same time that e-commerce and logistics companies struggle with labor shortages. “Automation is at the center” of solving those issues.

The Fetch Robotics Platform consists of what it says is the industry’s broadest line of mobile robots, as well as a cloud-based software system. Its Freight series of robots (pictured) can handle not only material transport, including finding and moving loads from individual parts to entire pallets, but also can collect data automatically to improve warehouse operations and deal with sometimes rapid changes needed in material flow.

“Warehouses today are far more dynamic than in the past – and they need to be in order to adapt to constantly changing parameters,” John Santagate, research director for service robotics at International Data Corp., said in Fetch’s funding release. “The Fetch Robotics solution provides their customers with faster time to automation and the means to continually adapt to changing supply and demand.”

One of the value propositions of Fetch’s system is that the robots can be trained, building a map of a facility with a single drive-through in a warehouse, in a matter of hours instead of requiring the installation of extensive hardware and software infrastructure. One customer, RK Logistics, said the robots took a few days to set up and now handle 30 percent to 50 percent of items in its facility. Wise said recently that Fetch also has robots at Google LLC, Microsoft Corp., Carnegie Mellon University, Panasonic Corp., Toyota Research Institute and other organizations.

Fetch said its robots were trained on convolutional neural networks to recognize other robots and move around. That technology requires lots of data for training, which suggests robotics is becoming less a hardware than a data game. In particular, Fetch’s radio frequency identification or RFID data collection platform has attracted interest from top automakers and others for tracking the precise location of inventory.

“If you look at these hard problems we have to solve down the road, you really need the data to train these automation tools to do a wide variety of tasks,” she said. “Soon it’s going to be about who has the most data.”

With the funding, Sway Ventures founding general partner Brian Nugent will join Fetch’s board. Wise said Sway appeared especially helpful for companies like hers looking to expand their sales teams, in addition to its connections to the logistics industry.

Photo: Fetch Robotics