What does 96% of the Fortune 100 have in common?

They all use 2PL (second party logistics) and/or 3PL (third party logistics) providers on a daily basis. 

86% of Fortune 500 companies do too.

Global logistics is the Ops department for world trade. The industry is worth about $9.4 tril. 

But the workforce is shrinking, staff costs are rising, horrible conditions are taking the fulfilment out of fulfilment centres, and bipedal sorting robots still cost $250,000 a pop.

Nexobot is helping small warehouses compete with the multi million-dollar robotic systems being deployed by incumbents like Amazon, using 3D printed robots and “micro-fulfilment” solutions, backed up by good old fashioned Australian manufacturing. 

And, maybe best of all, they’re not creepily and unnecessarily built to look like humans.

Meet the founders 

One Nexobot customer said: “I’ve been dealing with these guys for a few months now and you can tell that they aren’t full of sh*t”. 

It’s a good start - and a great way to sum up Nexobot’s founding team, comprising Dom Lindsay and Nicholas Hunt.

Previously supply chain architect for Australia Post, and Head of Solutions for Priority Robotics, Dom has a lengthy background designing and selling warehouse automation. His combo of deep domain expertise and industry connections has enabled the early execution of contracts and LOIs with a number of major providers. 

CTO Nicholas Hunt brings software engineering expertise, and is a reservist Captain in the Australian Army (one of the few founders who can actually get away with using phrases like ‘boots on the ground’ in team meetings).  

The founders are united by a vision:

“Humans do a lot of ‘average’ jobs in the logistics supply chain. We want people to do work that provides greater value than just moving boxes around.” 

Meet the problem 

The welfare of warehouse workers has truly become everybody’s business. It’s become so impractical not to use delivery services like Amazon Prime, yet hard to not feel the moral pinch. 

John Oliver calls the tech giant “the Michael Jackson of shipping”: “they’re the best at what they do, everybody tries to imitate them, and nobody who learns a third thing about them is happy they did.”

Not all warehouses are run like this, but in Dom’s words, it can still be “dirty, dangerous, and demeaning” work. 

Younger generations are ‘disinclin[ed] to apply for manual, repetitive jobs”, put off by conditions and injury rates. (In the UK, ambulances were called to Amazon warehouses 1400 times in 5 years.) 

On the enterprise side, it’s expensive to pay humans for the time slots most warehouse work needs doing (between midnight and 6am). Workers’ wages and protection costs increased by 4% last year.

Even the deftest hands are prone to error when working in odd, demand-based patterns and on night shifts. One customer discovery call revealed that 12 out of the 2000 parcels sorted daily ended up on the wrong trucks, or the wrong routes. 

The current automation solutions for parcel sorting are cost prohibitive, take months to deploy, require complex local computer networking, and tend not to be modular. Some demand 7-10 year contractual commitments.

That means smaller warehouses are priced out, can’t commit for long enough, and are not large or agile enough for off-the-shelf solutions.

When small warehouses struggle to fulfil large contracts from national 3PL providers like DHL, TNT, or FedEx to an agreed standard (i.e. requiring a 2-3 hour sorting window), they stand to permanently damage their reputations and lose contracts.

“We’re helping our customers to increase their volume by 20-30%, while reducing costs of human labour, and inefficiencies created by human error. One customer calculated that the system could reduce costs by $1k per day, doubling their margin.”

Meet the product 

Nexobot’s bots are 3D printed in-house by resident robotics engineer, Alexander Forster.

In the vein of Asimov's Laws of Robotics, but more practical than moral, they’re built on four core principles. They must be:

1. Manufacturable in Australia, with accessible manufacturing technologies
2. Linearly scalable manufacturing that only increases capacity on a per-needs basis
3. Distributable following Industry 4.0 principles
4. Compatible with off-the-shelf electronics that can be sourced from multiple Australian suppliers.

Nexobot’s sorting tables are modular, and can be installed, retrofitted, modified, and scaled according to need in all warehouse spaces (important as many are leased, not owned). 

The software is simple for any level of warehouse operator to use. 

The system can be deployed within 4-6 weeks (with competitors offering some pretty poor lead times of up to 8 months). Importantly for smaller businesses, customers don’t need to buy the bots outright. They just pay an installation fee, then on a per-use basis.

Up next for Nexobot

“Skalata was the only VC we spoke to who kept in contact after initial pushback – they advised us as we developed our product. Their focus on building sustainable businesses resonated with us - we don’t want to spend years raising, we want to build a great business.”

The team has just been accepted into the Swinburne’s Elevate accelerator program, and will start to expand focus into secondary markets - of which there are a lot.

Because the thing about logistics is it’s everywhere you look.

Shopping centres are increasingly developing logistics services, but have limited loading bays and non-native infrastructure.

Airports use a combination of expensive conveyors and manual handling. 

E-com (which represents over 20% of global retail sales) is expected to grow at another 8.9% this year, meaning more parcels and increasing demand for speed.

“Dom and Nicholas deeply understand the logistics industry, and Dom’s tenacity in chasing down customers - physically setting up shop at warehouse sites in regional Victoria and South Australia - shows strong customer dedication. We’re excited to watch them apply the same tenacity in their expansion across new markets.”

Agility Robotics’ answer - the walking, talking “Digit” - may be worth $150 million to Amazon. But when we’re talking about moving boxes around, maybe we don’t need to reinvent the human.

(With Digit’s current motor skills and weird “backwards legs”, we’re a long way off that anyway.)

Nexobot wants to keep things simple, affordable, and efficient, so small businesses can scale through automation, and human workers can stop being treated like they’re made of steel.