Locus Robotics Raises $41.6 Million for Autonomous Picking

Locus Robotics has raised $41.6 million from existing investors in a Series G round that remains open, chief executive Rick Faulk told Axios. The company has not disclosed the round's target, the participating investors, the use of proceeds or its current valuation — which, alongside a round funded by existing backers rather than new ones, is a notably quieter raise than its last.

The comparison is instructive. Locus raised $117 million in November 2022, led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management and G2 Venture Partners, taking total funding above $400 million at a valuation close to $2 billion. A $41.6 million insider round three and a half years later is a different market, and the warehouse robotics sector has spent that period discovering that deployment scale and unit economics matter more than fleet counts.

Locus has both. Its robots had completed more than 7 billion picks across customer warehouses as of March 2026, its customers include DHL Supply Chain, GEODIS, CEVA Logistics, FedEx and Cardinal Health, and DHL alone has committed to deploying 5,000 Locus robots worldwide, with the two companies reporting 1 billion picks at DHL facilities in February. The commercial model is robots-as-a-service — robots, software and support on subscription — which lets a warehouse flex fleet size seasonally without upfront capital, and which is the reason the company has scale in an industry where capital equipment sales stall on the approval cycle.

The strategic move behind the raise is the more interesting part. Locus built its business on collaborative picking, where robots carry totes and meet human pickers at the shelf, dividing the work so the human never walks the aisle end to end. In April 2026 it introduced Locus Array, designed to handle picking, putaway and replenishment autonomously rather than collaboratively, and in May it acquired Nexera Robotics, a Canadian developer of robotic gripping technology now being folded into Array.

That is a change of category, not a product extension. Collaborative picking works because a human handles the grasping problem, which remains the hardest part of warehouse automation given the variety of items in a general-merchandise catalogue. Removing the human means solving grasp, which is why the gripping acquisition is the substantive part of this story. Faulk has said fewer than 10 per cent of warehouses worldwide have enough automation — a large runway if the grasping problem yields.