Japan’s autonomous mobile robot developer LexxPluss snags $11M for US expansion

SHARE:
Image credit: LexxPluss

Japanese AMR (autonomous mobile robot) developer LexxPluss announced on Wednesday that it has secured 1.45 billion yen (about $11 million US) in a Series A round. Participating investors are Drone Fund, SBI Investment, DBJ Capital, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, Mizuho Lease’s Mirai Sozo Capital, Incubate Fund, Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Capital, Logistics Innovation Fund (operated by Seino Holdings and Spiral Innovation Partners), SMBC Venture Capital, SOSV, and Mizuho Capital.

This follows a pre-Series A round in November of 2021. Among these investors, Incubate Fund, MSI Capital, Logistics Innovation Fund, SMBC Venture Capital, SOSV, and Mizuho Capital followed their investment in a previous round. The latest round brought the company’s funding sum up to date to 1.8 billion yen (about $13.5 million)

SOSV, one of the investors, operates HAX Tokyo, the Tokyo chapter of the HAX hardware-focused startup accelerator together with Sumitomo Corporation (TSE: 8053) and SCSK (TSE: 9719), while LexxPluss was born out of the second batch of the program in 2020 and was later selected for the HAX Shenzhen program to mass-produce AMRs. After the latest funding, the company is setting up a US subsidiary in Newark, NJ to begin its expansion into the US market.

LexxPluss was founded in 2020 by Masaya Aso, a former Bosch employee. Besides LexxPluss, he is the president of Deep4Drive, an open mobility development community focused on automated driving and reinforcement learning. In order to remove the obstacles to introducing robots to the Japanese logistics industry, he is differentiating his company by developing robots that can cooperate with humans in both hardware and software in a hybrid form of AGV (automated guided vehicles) and AMR.

LexxPluss plans to expand the production scale of its Hybrid-AMR to 1,500 units per year over the next two years. Some of our readers may recall the company has been selected for the Incubate Camp 13th in 2020. In the fist batch (September 2020 to March 2021) of Hikyaku Labo, the startup accelerator by logistics giant Sagawa Express, LexxPluss won the Jury’s Special Award at the Demo Day.

via PR Times