Warehouse Robot Startup Ultra Raises $50 Million as AI Meets Manual Labor
Ultra, a New York startup deploying dual-arm robots to pack e-commerce orders, announced Wednesday it had raised $50 million in Series A funding led by Framework Ventures, bringing its total capital raised to $62 million. Y Combinator, which led Ultra's $12 million seed round alongside NextView, also participated in the new financing, according to Fortune.
The company occupies an unusual niche in warehouse automation: stationary robots that mimic the motions of human packers, stuffing boxes with products on behalf of third-party logistics providers who can't afford Amazon-scale infrastructure. The business model hinges on a robots-as-a-service subscription that bundles hardware, software and an upfront integration fee, though Ultra declined to disclose pricing or its new valuation.
What sets Ultra apart is what it doesn't build. The startup manufactures the robots themselves but licenses the intelligence that drives them from Physical Intelligence, the AI research lab valued at approximately $5.6 billion according to Fortune and founded by former Google DeepMind engineers. A blog post published by Physical Intelligence earlier this year demonstrated Ultra's OP1 robot completing a full warehouse shift at 96.4 percent autonomy using the company's π0.6 foundation model—a figure Ultra corroborated on LinkedIn.
"At Ultra, we are building what I like to call practical, general-purpose robots," co-founder and CEO Jon Miller Schwartz said in a November podcast. Then came the qualifier: the robots currently pack slower than their human counterparts. "We're not that far away," he added.
The hedging may be warranted. Ultra has placed OP1 units in warehouses scattered across New York, Atlanta, Carlstadt, Austin and several other U.S. cities. Manifest, an Austin-based third-party logistics operator, runs two of the machines, which the company said pack between 800 and 1,000 orders per robot daily. Colter Lutz, Manifest's senior operations manager, described the technology in a testimonial as handling "all that simple order processing" in the background.
Highline Commerce, a Brooklyn warehouse operator, deployed the robots earlier this year and reported that Ultra's machines now handle up to 30 percent of orders at its facility. "It's not a replacement. It's a new coworker," Charlie Lockwood, Highline's head of engineering, said in a company post. The framing is careful, perhaps deliberately so in an industry where automation anxiety runs high.
Schwartz founded Ultra in 2024 alongside Max Friefeld and Oliver Ortlieb, both of whom he worked with at Voodoo Manufacturing, itself a Y Combinator alum from the Winter 2017 batch. Friefeld, now chief operating officer, holds a degree in electrical and computer engineering from Harvey Mudd and previously worked at Boston Consulting Group. Ortlieb, the chief technology officer, also studied at Harvey Mudd and holds several patents in 3D printing. The trio went through Y Combinator's Summer 2024 cohort. LinkedIn data suggests the company employs between 11 and 50 people.
Ultra enters a warehouse automation market that is both crowded and consolidating. Amazon operates more than one million robots across upwards of 300 facilities. Locus Robotics, a specialist in autonomous mobile robots, reported a fleet exceeding 22,000 units as of late last year. Exotec has deployed goods-to-person systems at more than 200 sites globally. Ambi Robotics focuses on parcel sortation; Symbotic and Berkshire Grey offer broader platforms.
Still, the addressable opportunity appears sizable. Interact Analysis projected in mid-2024 that robotic picking would climb from roughly 5 percent of warehouse automation revenue to 10 percent by 2030. Mordor Intelligence pegged the overall warehouse automation market at $34.17 billion in 2026, expanding to $65.74 billion by 2031.
An SEC filing from August disclosed that Ultra's total offering amounted to $62.09 million, with $57.09 million sold to 53 investors as of early August. Michael Anderson of Framework Ventures is listed as a director. Framework, better known for its crypto investments, announced a $400 million fourth fund in June to expand into frontier technologies including AI and robotics—a pivot that positions Ultra squarely in the firm's new thesis.
Ultra said it would use the capital to scale deployments and deepen its collaboration with Physical Intelligence. The company's website promotes a three-month trial for prospective customers, with an option to expand when ready. Whether that model can compete with the scale economics of Amazon or the installed base of Locus remains an open question. For now, Ultra is betting that general-purpose intelligence can finally make dual-arm robots practical enough to pay for themselves, one box at a time.
