Annual Awards Program Recognizes Outstanding Health & Medical Technology Products and Companies

May 11, 2021 09:53 AM Eastern Daylight Time

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Vim, a leading technology company building digital infrastructure for health plans, care providers, and the members they mutually serve, has been selected as the winner of the “Best Overall Health Informatics Solution” award in the fifth annual MedTech Breakthrough Awards program conducted by MedTech Breakthrough, an independent market intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies, and products in the global health and medical technology market.

“Our innovative technology stack combined with our unique business and growth models are driving impact at the intersection of value-based care, interoperability, and consumer and provider empowerment.”

Vim uses breakthrough technology to seamlessly connect payers to providers at health care’s last mile: clinical workflow at the point of care. Vim makes it easy for payers and other third parties to connect directly to existing provider EHRs, providing the digital infrastructure for the next generation of health care network performance. Powered by a mix of agent-based connections, robotic process automation, and dynamic API interactions, Vim’s integration engine allows for the augmentation of existing interfaces with minimal provider lift or dependencies on third-parties.

“The pace of change in cost, quality, and experience in US health care has been limited by the costs and manual nature of data and workflow connections,” said James Johnson, managing director, MedTech Breakthrough. “Vim is addressing this issue head-on, equipping leading health plans in the country with connective performance technology to accelerate improvements to quality, efficiency, and experience across their provider networks. Congratulations to the entire team at Vim for this incredible example of breakthrough health care technology, taking home our ‘Best Overall Health Informatics Solution’ award.”

The mission of the MedTech Breakthrough Awards is to honor excellence and recognize the innovation, hard work, and success in a range of health and medical technology categories, including Robotics, Clinical Administration, Telehealth, Patient Engagement, Electronic Health Records (EHR), mHealth, Medical Devices, Medical Data and many more. This year’s program attracted more than 3,850 nominations from over 17 different countries throughout the world.

“Our innovative technology stack combined with our unique business and growth models are driving impact at the intersection of value-based care, interoperability, and consumer and provider empowerment,” said Oron Afek, CEO and Co-founder of Vim. “We are extremely honored to be recognized by MedTech Breakthrough in this effort, especially in an unprecedented year like this, and we look forward to continued growth and success in the years to come.”

Vim’s Referral Guidance integrates personalized and context-aware recommendations directly into EHR referral workflows to help providers refer patients to high performing specialists. Quality and Diagnosis Gaps embed critical data on care gaps and suspected diagnoses into standard EHR encounter workflows, putting this key piece of value-based care data in the right place at the right time and assisting in clinical documentation. Digital Scheduling allows payers to connect their websites and contact centers directly to provider calendars to optimize member experience and steer to highest value network providers.

Vim currently partners with multiple regional Blues plans and two of the largest national insurers in the country. Vim recently announced strategic investments from Walgreens Boots Alliance as well as Anthem. Their national provider network is rapidly growing, and is on track to include tens of thousands of providers by the end of the year.

About Vim

Founded in 2015, Vim connects data to workflow at health care’s “last mile”: within clinical operations at the point of patient care. Health plans, patients, and medical providers of every size – from independent practitioners to integrated delivery systems – use Vim software to connect data and care across the health system. Vim’s mission is to power affordable, high quality health care through seamless connectivity. For more information, please visit getvim.com.

About MedTech Breakthrough

Part of Tech Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence and recognition platform for global technology innovation and leadership, the MedTech Breakthrough Awards program is an independent program devoted to honoring excellence in medical and health related technology companies, products, services and people. The MedTech Breakthrough Awards provide a platform for public recognition around the achievements of breakthrough health and medical companies and products in categories that include Patient Engagement, mHealth, Health & Fitness, Clinical Administration, Healthcare IoT, Medical Data, Healthcare Cybersecurity and more. For more information visit MedTechBreakthrough.com.

Contacts
Phoebe Byers
Email: phoebe@getvim.com

Vim builds second quarter with new strategic investments as customer network footprint and product portfolio expand

April 21, 2021 09:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Vim, a leading technology company building digital infrastructure for US health care, today announced investments from Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA), Anthem (ANTM), and Frist Cressey Ventures. The addition of these strategic investors reflects Vim’s accelerating product and market progress deploying integrated data and workflow solutions for leading health plans and providers across the country.

“We are honored to be backed by and working in partnership with some of the largest and most innovative companies in US health care.”

Vim’s solutions are widely used by leading health plans, providers, and pharmacies engaged in value-based care programs. Vim’s Quality Gaps, Diagnosis Gaps, Referral Guidance, and Digital Scheduling solutions easily and seamlessly integrate with existing clinical systems at the point of care to reduce burden for health plans and providers working to succeed on value, outcomes, and experience.

WBA’s investment will support accelerated rollout of Vim’s point of care integration technology and continued commercial growth across health plan and provider groups throughout the country. “We believe data connected in clinical workflows is essential to drive real-time decision support at the point of care, and Vim’s approach allows us to deepen our integration capabilities across the clinical ecosystem,” said Jared Josleyn, Vice President of Innovation, Walgreens Boots Alliance. “Supporting Vim’s work to connect health plan payers to providers is a valuable opportunity and we’re looking forward to seeing their technology continue to move health care forward.” Additionally, Vim has welcomed Li Zhong, Vice President of Global Mergers, Acquisitions and Development at WBA to the Board of Directors.

Vim also welcomes Elizabeth Canis, Vice President of Emerging Businesses & Partnerships at Anthem and Tim Kaja, Senior Vice President of OptumCare to the Board of Directors. In her role at Anthem, Canis builds market leading solutions, diversifies sources of future growth, and identifies distinct partnerships within the industry. Anthem’s partnership with Vim will enhance Vim’s point-of-care technology to align data and workflows to support Anthem providers for accelerated success. At OptumCare, Kaja oversees operations related to supportive data and workflow technology for OptumCare’s national network of health care providers. Kaja will work closely with Vim’s executive leadership team and existing Board members to support Vim’s ongoing strategy for continued customer and product success.

With a focus on investing in technology and service businesses with solutions that improve quality of care, system integration, patient outcomes, and population health and well-being, Frist Cressey Ventures joins existing backers Great Point Ventures, Sequoia, Premera, and Optum. “Frist Cressey is thrilled to join Vim on their journey to build the digital infrastructure of a better working health care system,” said Senator Bill Frist MD, Co-Founder and Partner at Frist Cressey Ventures. “Vim’s point of care integrations and increasingly sophisticated suite of health care performance and access products have the potential to take value-based care to the next level, which is what our health system needs.”

“We are honored to be backed by and working in partnership with some of the largest and most innovative companies in US health care,” said Oron Afek, Vim Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer. “We share a vision for powering a new era of network performance by seamlessly integrating data at the point of care to improve quality, experience, and total cost of care. These investments and partnerships represent major leaps forward for Vim and our opportunity to make an ever deeper and broader impact on US health care.”

About Vim

Founded in 2015, Vim connects data to workflow at health care’s “last mile”: within clinical operations at the point of patient care. Health plans, patients, and medical providers of every size – from independent practitioners to integrated delivery systems – use Vim software to connect data and care across the health system. Vim’s mission is to power affordable, high quality health care through seamless connectivity. For more information, please visit getvim.com.

About WBA

Walgreens Boots Alliance (Nasdaq: WBA) is a global leader in retail and wholesale pharmacy, touching millions of lives every day through dispensing and distributing medicines, its convenient retail locations, digital platforms and health and beauty products. The company has more than 100 years of trusted health care heritage and innovation in community pharmacy and pharmaceutical wholesaling.

Including equity method investments, WBA has a presence in more than 25 countries, employs more than 450,000 people and has more than 21,000 stores.

WBA’s purpose is to help people across the world lead healthier and happier lives. The company is proud of its contributions to healthy communities, a healthy planet, an inclusive workplace and a sustainable marketplace. WBA is a Participant of the United Nations Global Compact and adheres to its principles-based approach to responsible business. WBA is included in FORTUNE’s 2021 list of the World’s Most Admired Companies. This is the 28th consecutive year that WBA or its predecessor company, Walgreen Co., has been named to the list.

About Anthem

Anthem is a leading health benefits company dedicated to improving lives and communities, and making healthcare simpler. Through its affiliated companies, Anthem serves more than 110 million people, including approximately 43 million within its family of health plans. We aim to be the most innovative, valuable and inclusive partner. For more information, please visit www.antheminc.com or follow @AnthemInc on Twitter.

About Frist Cressey Ventures

At Frist Cressey Ventures, our mission is focused on accelerating the growth of high potential healthcare enterprises through value-added partnerships. We invest in technology and service businesses with viable solutions that improve quality of care, system integration, patient outcomes, and population health and well-being. We join like-minded entrepreneurs who share similar core values in their pursuit to improve healthcare.

Frist Cressey Ventures focuses our time and attention on three key areas that accelerate growth, reduce risk, and maximize return on investment: recruiting top talent, connecting partnerships with our deep industry network, and executing our partnerships’ plans to improve healthcare.

Contacts
Phoebe Byers
Email: phoebe@getvim.com

New fundraise supports company’s accelerated growth as API-first digital transformation becomes a top initiative across all industries

April 21, 2021 09:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–RapidAPI, a next-generation API platform that enables developers and enterprises to find, connect to, and manage thousands of APIs, announced today that it has raised $60M million in its Series C funding round. The financing was led by Green Bay Ventures and includes new investor, Stripes. Existing investors include Andreessen Horowitz, DNS Capital, M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), Viola Growth, and Grove Ventures, bringing the total amount raised for RapidAPI to $122.5 million.

“RapidAPI’s next-generation platform is uniquely built for modern software development, providing a unified experience across the entire development life cycle, allowing millions of developers to connect with thousands of APIs and microservices.”

The investment comes on the heels of a high-growth year for RapidAPI amidst a pandemic that drove a record number of developers and companies to the RapidAPI platform to advance their digital initiatives and accelerate the delivery of their software and services to the market.

Driven by the explosion of APIs, federation of API programs, acceleration of cloud initiatives, and the push to microservices, companies have turned to RapidAPI to modernize their infrastructure in order to remain competitive in today’s environment of digital disruption.

The recent fundraise will be used to support the influx of new developers to the platform, the onboarding of leading API providers to the public marketplace, and the expansion of the API platform, including RapidAPI’s Enterprise Hub, to serve the rapidly growing enterprise customer base.

“As APIs become the building blocks for digital transformation efforts across all industries, we’ve seen a fundamental shift toward API platforms and tools like RapidAPI that are built to handle the realities of today’s complex, multi-cloud, multiservice, and multi-API environments,” said Iddo Gino, RapidAPI Founder and CEO. “RapidAPI’s next-generation platform is uniquely built for modern software development, providing a unified experience across the entire development life cycle, allowing millions of developers to connect with thousands of APIs and microservices.”

Added Gino, “Over the course of the year, we’ve made significant investments in our platform, adding API testing and API design through the acquisition of Paw in February. The additional funding will enable us to continue to build a flexible API platform with the features and functionality needed to provide developers and organizations with a flexible platform that integrates with an organization’s existing software development environment, making it easier to find, connect to, and manage APIs.”

A Year of Developer Adoption, Product Innovation, and Enterprise Traction

Recent reports, including the second annual RapidAPI Developer Survey Report , indicate that developer reliance on APIs accelerated during the pandemic and will continue to increase in 2021. In fact, according to the survey, 61% of developers used more APIs in 2020 than in 2019, and 71% plan to use even more this year.

This trend was also apparent by usage of the RapidAPI platform. Over the last 12 months, RapidAPI has experienced significant growth across its platform. RapidAPI has almost 3 million developers on the marketplace, adding more than 750,000 new developers over the course of the year. Additionally, there are now more than 35,000 APIs on the Marketplace, doubling the number from the same time last year. RapidAPI is continuing to add more than 1,000 new APIs per month, offering APIs from providers that include Microsoft, IBM, Twilio, SendGrid, Nexmo, Crunchbase, and more.

Paid API subscriptions were also on the rise in 2020, as 12,000 new API subscribers were added to the platform. Another area of significant growth is with RapidAPI for Teams. RapidAPI for Teams enables developers to create a private workspace to share and collaborate on internal APIs and microservices within their team. Today, there are more than 55,000 teams on RapidAPI.

RapidAPI has also seen an increase in the number of enterprises that are using the RapidAPI Enterprise Hub, a white-labeled version of its Marketplace that enables development teams, partners, and customers to discover and connect to internal APIs as well as external API subscriptions. Over the last year, RapidAPI has more than doubled the number of companies using the RapidAPI Platform, including Fortune 500 organizations across the financial services, insurance, telecom, and hospitality sectors.

Finally, the company expanded its API Platform to add a host of new capabilities and features from Gateway integration to support new types of APIs such as Kafka and new products such as RapidAPI Testing and RapidAPI Design by Paw.

RapidAPI By the Numbers

• 3 million developers have signed up on the RapidAPI Marketplace
• More than 35,000 APIs are currently available on the marketplace
• Trillion+ API calls go through the marketplace
• Doubled the number of enterprise customers: RapidAPI Enterprise customers include Fortune 500 customers across financial services, telecom, manufacturing, and hospitality
• $60M Series C funding raised
• $122.5M raised to date

For more information

• Iddo Gino’s headshot, a team photo, and other visuals supporting the announcement are available here.
• Read more the RapidAPI Enterprise Hub
• Check out the RapidAPI Developer Survey
• Register for our upcoming webinar: From Discovery to Analytics: The Top 8 Reasons to choose an API Hub over a Developer Portal

About RapidAPI

RapidAPI, the world’s largest API Marketplace, is used by millions of developers to find, test and connect to thousands of APIs—all with a single account, API key and SDK. For enterprise organizations, RapidAPI offers RapidAPI Enterprise Hub, a white-labeled version of the marketplace that enables the company’s developers, customers, and partners to find, manage, and connect to hundreds of internal APIs, as well as external API subscriptions.

Contacts
Erinn O’Sullivan
erinn@bospar.com
804-400-0075

Surgeons Gain Access to Real-Time Intraoperative Visual Data and Images to Improve Patient Outcomes

BOSTON, April 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Activ Surgical™, a digital surgery pioneer, today announced the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 510(k) clearance of the company’s ActivSight™ Intraoperative Imaging Module for enhanced surgical visualization. The hardware agnostic imaging module has been designed to provide surgeons real-time intraoperative visual data and imaging not currently available to surgeons through existing technologies, helping to improve patient outcomes and safety in the operating room.

“Receiving FDA 510(k) clearance for our ActivSight enhanced visualization module is a significant milestone in bringing Activ Surgical’s technology to operating rooms around the world,” said Todd Usen, CEO of Activ Surgical. “Given there is a $36 billion cost for preventable surgical errors, we believe ActivSight has the potential to make an immediate impact in the OR. We look forward to working closely with our initial pilot customers over the next several months to further validate ActivSight and revolutionize surgical care.”

ActivSight is the company’s proprietary hardware imaging module that will power its next product, ActivInsights. ActivInsights will be part of the ActivEdge™ software platform, which will use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology to produce surgical insights. The first ActivInsight that will be made available is perfusion insights, and will offer the ability to see blood flow and perfusion in real time, without the use of traditional dyes.

“My mission when I founded Activ Surgical in 2017 was to democratize surgical care by extending insights from experienced surgeons to all surgical systems, ensuring world class surgical care for everyone around the world,” said Dr. Peter Kim, Founder and CSMO, Activ Surgical. “The FDA clearance of our ActivSight enhanced visualization modules brings us one step closer to bringing this vision to fruition, in addition to improving patient safety and surgical outcomes for all.”

To date, 13 major healthcare systems around the world have committed to ActivSight’s initial launch, which is planned for the second half of 2021. For more information on Activ Surgical and its technologies, please visit https://www.activsurgical.com/#about.

About Activ Surgical

Activ Surgical, the company that completed the world’s first autonomous robotic surgery of soft tissue, is building hardware-agnostic surgical software that allows surgical systems to collaborate with surgeons. Activ Surgical’s patent-protected surgical software platform reduces unintended and preventable surgical complications by enhancing a surgeon’s intra-operative decision making. Activ Surgical is privately held, and backed by DNS Capital, GreatPoint Ventures (GPV), Artis Ventures, Tao Capital Partners, LRVHealth, Rising Tide VC, SONY Innovation Fund and 8VC. More information can be found at www.activsurgical.com.

CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA – April [8], 2021 – New Realm Brewing Company is thrilled to announce the opening of an 11,000 square-foot facility on Daniel Island in Charleston with an on-site brewery, restaurant, outdoor patio, intimate music venue and dedicated private event spaces. The site, currently occupied by Dockery’s, will be re-branded New Realm in May and is located at 880 Island Park Drive in the heart of Daniel Island, easily accessible from downtown Charleston.

Much like the New Realm’s flagship Atlanta location, the Daniel Island facility will feature the Company’s handcrafted lineup of award-winning craft beers and limited specialty releases, some available only on Daniel Island. At the helm of the brewery will be New Realm’s brewmaster Mitch Steele, who is recognized as one of the craft beer industry’s best brewers and has helped drive brewing industry innovation and the IPA market for several decades.

In keeping with the history of the site, food and music will also play a major role in the customer experience. The on-site scratch kitchen will be serving New Realm classics such as the New Realm Burger, the Instagram-famous Mac & Cheese, as well as locally sourced specialties. Complementing New Realm’s high-quality fare and craft beer will be frequent live music in a venue that boasts state-of-the-art acoustic and sound technology.

“Ever since we opened our Atlanta brewery and restaurant in 2018, we’ve been asked by our neighbors in South Carolina when New Realm beers would be available in the state. We are thrilled to announce that the time has come. A South Carolina location has always been in our plans and the Charleston area is the perfect location to add a brewery and restaurant,” said Carey Falcone, Co-Founder and CEO of New Realm. “We will continue to enhance the original Dockery’s vision of a destination that brings the community together through great food, great beer, and great music.”

New Realm’s brewery and restaurant is expected to maintain approximately 100 employees in the local Charleston market. The Company is focused on positively impacting the communities in which it operates, and maintains a firm commitment to environmental sustainability, supporting local and independent craft communities, and the art and science of great craft brewing and distilling.

The Daniel Island brewery and restaurant will be New Realm’s fourth location alongside its flagship brewery and restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia (550 Somerset Terrace NE in Atlanta, Georgia), production brewery and restaurant in Virginia Beach, Virginia (1209 Craft Lane in Virginia Beach, Virginia), and their [soon to be opening / recently opened] distillery and restaurant in Savannah, Georgia (120 Whitaker Street in Savannah, Georgia ).

New Realm products are available at its locations as well as at bars and retail outlets throughout Georgia and Virginia. With the brewery and restaurant expansion into South Carolina, New Realm products will soon become available across the state. For a complete list of locations, hours, information on private events and public tours, as well as additional information, visit www.newrealmbrewing.com.

About New Realm Brewing:

New Realm is an American craft brewery and distillery started in 2016 by co-founders Carey Falcone, Bob Powers and Mitch Steele. The Company has a flagship brewery and restaurant in Atlanta, GA, a production brewery and restaurant in Virginia Beach, VA and is opening a distillery and restaurant in Savannah, GA April 2021. New Realm’s core principles are quality, creativity, authenticity, and striving for perfection, all with a customer-centric community-focused commitment and approach.

New Realm’s awards include Brewbound’s “Rising Star” brewery, Ratebeer’s “Best New Brewer in Georgia,” Ratebeer’s 11th “Best New Brewer in the World”, and Virginia Craft Beer Cup’s gold medal and “Best in Show” for Euphonia Pilsner. Brewmaster Mitch Steele was awarded the Russell Scherer Award for Innovation in Brewing and authored the book IPA: Brewing Techniques, Recipes and the Evolution of India Pale Ale.

A CONCERTO IS A CONVERSATION tells the story of virtuoso jazz pianist and film composer Kris Bowers as he tracks his family’s lineage through his 91-year-old grandfather from Jim Crow Florida to the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Nimble adds AI pioneers Fei-Fei Li and Sebastian Thrun to its Board

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Nimble Robotics, Inc., a robotics and ecommerce fulfillment technology company, today announced a $50 million Series A financing led by DNS Capital and GSR Ventures with participation from Accel and Reinvent Capital among others. The capital raised will further accelerate the company’s hiring plans, product and technology development and scaling of robot deployments for its customers’ fulfillment operations.

“I am excited about the team at Nimble and their ambition to invent the next generation of fulfillment centers, building on the best of robotics and artificial intelligence.”

The company also announced the appointment of AI industry pioneers to its Board of Directors:

• Fei-Fei Li, Sequoia Professor Computer Science at Stanford University, Co-Director of Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), former Director of Stanford AI Lab (SAIL), former Chief Scientist of AI at Google Cloud, Twitter Board Director, and creator of ImageNet.
• Sebastian Thrun, Founder of GoogleX and Waymo (Google’s self-driving car division), co-founder of Udacity and CEO of Kitty Hawk, former Director of Stanford’s AI Lab (SAIL)
  Nimble’s mission is to democratize affordable, on-demand fulfillment for every ecommerce retailer. Nimble’s fleet of AI-powered robots intelligently pick, pack, and handle millions of products, spanning from apparel and electronics to beauty, general merchandise and grocery items. Today, Nimble robots are deployed in fulfillment centers across the United States picking over 100,000 items per day for customers including several Fortune 500 retailers.

Catalyzed by the Covid-19 pandemic, eCommerce doubled in 2020, accelerating nearly 10 years of growth in the span of just a few months, according to McKinsey & Co. Finding reliable warehouse labor now ranks among the highest pain points for retailers as they attempt to maintain business continuity and simultaneously scale their fulfillment operations. With a declining available labor pool and sky-rocketing eCommerce sales there is a shortage of over half a million warehouse workers. Robots can help fill this labor void.

“There is no fulfillment solution that can handle double the orders, fulfill them in half the time, with half the staff, for half the cost. We’ve assembled an all-star team of engineers to build the future of autonomous on-demand fulfillment to solve this problem. Our next-gen robotics technology will allow retailers and grocers of all sizes to have the fastest and most affordable fulfillment,” said Simon Kalouche, Nimble’s founder and CEO.

In today’s fulfillment centers, the process of picking, handling, and packing individual products into customer boxes is still performed manually. In the past decade, advances in warehouse automation have been primarily confined to robot shuttles and conveyor systems that transport shelves and bins of inventory from storage to manual pick stations in what is called a goods-to-person system. In even the most highly automated fulfillment centers, the piece-picking task, where products are picked off a shelf or out of a bin and packed into the customer order, remains a manual task performed by people. It is the most challenging task to automate because of the vast diversity in product size, shape, weight and fragility, and thus has been the most labor-intensive part of the fulfillment process.

Automated piece-picking has yet to be adopted at scale because robots have struggled to handle the millions of different eCommerce products with human-level reliability. Additionally, the notoriously high capital and time costs of technology integration within the fulfillment center has stifled retailer’s willingness to implement and adopt new technologies.

“Nimble addresses both reliability and integration concerns. Their robots have been picking reliably in production, at scale for over a year for some of the world’s largest retailers. They’ve developed an AI-powered product that makes integration fast and frictionless for their retail customers,” said Fei-Fei Li, seed investor and Nimble Board Member.

“Nimble’s unique deep imitation learning approach has created a breakthrough platform with the ability to seamlessly handle the millions of objects shipped from fulfillment centers” according to Sunny Kumar, Partner, GSR Ventures.

“Nimble is a plug and play solution and has repeatedly demonstrated that its robot systems can be integrated and picking in production on day 1 without changing a single line of code in the warehouse management system. This advantage allows Nimble to scale and expand its footprint faster than other competitors,” said Michael Pucker, Chairman and CEO, DNS Capital.

Nimble’s team brings world-class engineering talent from Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Berkeley, Cornell, Ohio State, NASA, SpaceX, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, GoogleX and other leading technology companies and academic institutions.

“I am excited about the team at Nimble and their ambition to invent the next generation of fulfillment centers, building on the best of robotics and artificial intelligence,” said Sebastian Thrun, Nimble Board Member.

The company intends to double its workforce in 2021, hiring top-tier engineering and operational talent.

ABOUT NIMBLE
Nimble builds AI-powered robots that pick and pack anything to enable the fastest, most affordable, and most sustainable on-demand order fulfillment. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, the company is backed by investors including: Accel, DNS Capital, GSR Ventures and Reinvent Capital with notable individual investors including Fei-Fei Li, Andy Rachleff, Jim Swartz and Georges Harik. More information is available at: http://nimble.ai/

Contacts
Kerry Walker
Walker Communications
kerry@walkercomms.com

Warehouse automation company Nimble Robotics today announced that it has raised a $50 million Series A. Led by DNS Capital and GSR Ventures and featuring Accel and Reinvent Capital, the round will go toward helping the company essentially double its headcount this year.

Founded by former Stanford PhD student Simon Kalouche, the system utilizes deep imitation learning – a popular concept in robotics research that helps systems map and improve through imitation.

“Instead of letting it sit in a lab for five years and creating this robotic application before it’s finally ready to deploy to the real world, we deployed it today,” says Kalouche. “It’s not fully autonomous – it’s autonomous maybe 90, 95% of the time. The other 5-10% is assisted by remote human operators, but it’s reliable on day one, and it’s reliable on day 10,000.”

Nimble is one in a long list of robotics companies to get a boast from Covid-19. The pandemic has driven both explosive growth in ecommerce and interest in automation, contributing to a significant excitement around the warehouse fulfillment tech. Nimble has also benefited from the rapid deployment of its systems.

“We’re not the first robotic pick, place and pack company that’s out there. We’ve grown really fast and have a lot of robots deployed in production,” Kalouche tells TechCrunch. “A lot of people have robots in the corner of a warehouse. Right now, we have heaps of robots deployed, and we’re growing really quickly. These are robots that are in production and picking tens of thousands of real orders every single day for each of our customers.”

In addition to the large funding round, the company is also adding two impressive names to its Board of Directors: Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, Fei-Fei Li and Kitty Hawk/Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun.

“Nimble addresses both reliability and integration concerns,” Li, who’s also a seed investor, said in a release tied to the news. “Their robots have been picking reliably in production, at scale for over a year for some of the world’s largest retailers. They’ve developed an AI-powered product that makes integration fast and frictionless for their retail customers.”