Japanese warehouse robot start-up raises $84m

Silicon Valley-based Pegasus Tech Ventures, 7 Industries of the Netherlands, and angel investor James Kuffner also participated, as did Accenture, the company’s technology partner since 2019. It marks nine years since Mujin’s last funding round.

Mujin was founded in 2011 by Rosen Diankov, a roboticist previously of the University of Tokyo. The company received a JPY 75m Series A from University of Tokyo Edge Capital (UTEC) the following year and a JPY 600m Series B in 2014 featuring UTEC and Jafco. Management bought out UTEC’s position in 2019.

Mujin develops intelligent, autonomous, multi-joint robots for factory use cases. It claims to have solved palletising and de-palletising for both single and mixed stock-keeping unit orders, precise picking to streamline e-commerce order fulfilment, metal bin picking, truck trailer and container unloading, as well as quick deployment of robot cells.

The core offering is known as a platform called MujinController, which is touted as transforming industrial robots from any manufacturer into intelligent machines capable of automating a range of applications across manufacturing and logistics. Food, medical, electronics, automobile, and logistics are the main target industries.

“Mujin has developed a platform technology that enables companies to develop and deploy automation solutions that were previously not possible,” Anis Uzzaman, founder and CEO of Pegasus Tech, said in a statement “As a result, Mujin has been able to race ahead of the competition and deliver results that others cannot. We look forward to helping Mujin accelerate its growth in the US market.”

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• Topics
• North Asia
• Industrials
• Technology
• Expansion
• Japan
• SBI Holdings
• robotics
• manufacturing