Remember Rosie from the Jetsons? That’s what Fetch Robotics is building, but instead of dealing with housekeeping and Elroy, the robots are designed for warehouses and e-commerce fulfillment centers. The company was founded in 2014 and has since raised $23 million and started shipping robots to pilot customers. The secret? Fetch Robotics didn’t build a series of robots. The company built a robotic platform, on which it can create different robots for various tasks.
We’re excited to announce Fetch Robotics CEO Melonee Wise is coming to Disrupt SF this September to chat about her company’s quest to create a robotic pack mule. And, of course, we’ll probably talk about the safeguards in place that prevent these robotic pack mules from revolting against their masters.
Fetch Robotics is operating in a space created by Amazon. In 2012 Amazon bought Kiva Systems for $775 million and shortly afterwards, stopped selling the company’s warehouse robots to other companies. Since then, Amazon has deployed tens of thousands of these robots in the company’s warehouses. There is clearly a need and Fetch Robotics is one of the handful of startups addressing this market.
Melonee Wise came to Fetch Robotics after founding and running Unbounded Robotic, a spin-off of Willow Garage where she led a team of engineers developing next-generation robot hardware. She knows robots and we’re excited to bring her to the Disrupt SF stage.
Wise joins our growing list of Disrupt SF speakers that currently includes Hyperloop One’s Shervin Pishevar, Twitch’s Emmet Shear and Instacart’s Apoorva Mehta.
This year the show is returning to San Francisco’s Pier 48 and there are only a few days left to save $1,200 on general admission tickets. Don’t procrastinate. The lineup is amazing this year.
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