A German robotics startup wants to bring automated textile handling to e-commerce returns.
The Munich-based firm Sewts announced the closing of a 7-million-euro ($7.6 million) Series A financing round last week. The funding will go toward accelerating the roll out of its existing Sewts.VELUM product, as well as entering new markets, such as the processing of clothing returns in e-commerce.
Using a combination of artificial intelligence, robotics and material simulation, Sewts has focused its business on developing robots with “human-like” perception and grasping capabilities that can handle textiles. In 2022, three years after its founding, it launched its first product, Sewts.VELUM. Designed to help industrial laundries overcome labor shortages, Sewts said, the system automatically picks crumpled, laundered towels and feeds them into folding machines, reducing manual workload.
Sewts framed its technology as a way of bringing the production and recycling of textiles closer to consumer markets, thereby reducing transportation-associated carbon emissions, overproduction and waste. Though its long-term vision is to automate clothes production, its more immediate plans include automating the handling of returned clothes in e-commerce. It has already created a prototype for this use case with the help of the German Otto Group, Sewts said.
“Our long-term vision is a ‘moonshot’ idea—to revolutionize the production of textiles,” co-founder and CEO Alexander Bley said in a statement. “To get there, we first dedicate ourselves to the most promising niche markets and then approach the big vision step by step.”
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New investors Emerald Technology Ventures, CNB Capital, EquityPitcher Ventures and Nabtesco Technology Venture led the Series A round, with contributions from existing shareholders Bayern Kapital, APEX Ventures and HTGF.
“Physical AI will enable the automation of complex, laborious tasks which so far had to be done by humans,” Michal Natora, investment director at Emerald Technology Ventures, said in a statement. “We think that, through physical AI, freed-up human capital will be one of the biggest productivity drivers in the next decade. Our investment in sewts comes from the conviction that this company has the ingredients to become one of the leaders in physical AI.”
As Sewts develops and perfects robots capable of manipulating soft goods, automation elsewhere continues to take off. DHL Supply Chain, for example, plans to deploy 5,000 autonomous mobile robots across its global warehousing and distribution network. The company originally teamed with Locus Robotics in 2021, deploying 500 assisted picking robots at its warehouses that year. In 2022, that number grew to 2,000.
At Walmart, meanwhile, investments in automation are “far exceeding” productivity targets, according to chief financial officer John David Rainey. In three years, the company expects approximately 65 percent of its stores will be serviced by automation, while approximately 55 percent of its fulfillment center volume will move through automated facilities.