On Wednesday, Third Wave Automation, the West Coast autonomous industrial tech startup that aims to revolutionize global supply chains by disrupting what it calls “the workhorse” (i.e., the humble forklift), announced that it has successfully closed a $40 million Series B venture capital round. The round was led by sector-agnostic Silicon Valley VC Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Innovation Endeavors, Eclipse, and Toyota Ventures.
“When I last visited the Third Wave facility and saw its forklifts easily completing picks and places my jaw dropped, and I knew Norwest needed to be a part of this journey. We are thrilled to support the Third Wave team as they fundamentally alter the warehouse and material handling industry,” said Norwest General Partner Matt Howard, who will join Third Wave’s board of directors.
“While we weren’t actively raising, having the opportunity to bring Norwest and Matt’s expertise into our orbit was too good to pass up,” said ThirdWave CEO Arshan Poursohi. “This extra capital will allow us to accelerate hiring and speed our path to the commercial market following our recent successful technical trials. We are now in active conversations with the top 20 3PL’s and retailers in the industry. There is a real need for our technology and we are eager to meet that need.”
Focus on the Forklift
Third Wave’s focus on the forklift tilts it toward an industry valued at over $100 billion in annual global revenues, with an expected CAGR of 9 percent from 2021 to 2027 and direct involvement in more than 2 million units shipped each year by the end of that interval. The company committed years of R&D to create a driverless forklift that combines adaptive automation, continuous learning, and what it calls “shared autonomy.”
The Third Wave forklift can handle any pallet or payload from any warehouse location, “learning” each location’s unique spatial and material configuration, using LiDAR technology to detect both static and moving objectives, and dynamically adjusting to changes in environment as well as machine wear-and-tear.
In May of this year, Third Wave signed a commercial and strategic agreement with Toyota Industries Corporation (TICO) to integrate its technology into autonomous material handling vehicles.
“Third Wave’s machine learning first approach to industrial automation has enabled them to develop a solution that has previously been unavailable to the global supply chain,” said Seth Winterroth, who led Third Wave’s seed funding for Eclipse. “Since our initial investment in 2018, the team has executed tirelessly to build a product that arms their customers with the operational efficiency and resiliency needed in today’s heavily burdened supply chains. With this funding, Third Wave is poised to become the most significant industrial automation company of the modern era.”
“Third Wave uses next-gen robotics to solve decades-old challenges with warehousing, which drives huge improvements to both worker safety and productivity,” said Scott Brady, partner at fellow investor Innovation Endeavors. “Solving these problems helps build resilience against issues that arise in logistics and across the supply chain. We congratulate the Third Wave team on their continued growth and are excited to support them as they roll out even more of these advanced robotics solutions.”
