Ultra raises $50M Series A to scale its warehouse robot fleet

The Brooklyn startup's dual-arm OP1 packing robots run on a monthly subscription — and a new partnership puts Physical Intelligence's AI in the loop.

Brooklyn-based Ultra announced a $50 million Series A on October 9, led by Framework Ventures with Y Combinator participating. Combined with a $12 million seed round led by Y Combinator and Next View, the startup has raised $62 million to date.

Ultra builds dual-arm packing robots, called the OP1, for third-party logistics warehouses and rents them out by the month: customers pay an upfront integration fee plus ongoing monthly charges for hardware and software support. The company says its robots have packed more than 500,000 orders across sites in New York, Georgia, New Jersey, and Texas, and that at Highline Commerce in Brooklyn they handle up to 30 percent of fulfillment volume.

Alongside the raise, Ultra deepened its partnership with Physical Intelligence, the robot-AI company valued at $5.6 billion. Under the arrangement, Ultra builds and installs the robots while Physical Intelligence supplies the AI models that let each unit adapt to a specific customer's setup. Physical Intelligence says its latest model reached 96.4 percent autonomy during an eight-hour warehouse shift in a demonstration video.

Co-founder and chief executive Jon Miller Schwartz frames the raise around deployment rather than demos: making robots reliably useful in real warehouses and earning the trust of the people working alongside them is the hard part of industrial robotics, he argues — and stationary systems are having more real-world impact today than humanoid robots, which draw most of the attention.

Ultra was founded by Schwartz, Max Friefeld, Oliver Ortlieb, and Chetan Parthiban, previously of Voodoo Manufacturing and Layer By Layer, and joined Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch. The company says demand has been strong enough to let it raise subscription prices.