Ultra raises $62 million, deepens Physical Intelligence tie-up

Ultra's raise lands as warehouse and logistics automation draws a widening field of players. The company says its devices have packed more than half a million orders for shipping, and they specialize in packing goods for transit at third-party logistics sites.

The startup's "body and brains" split is central to its pitch. Ultra builds and installs the physical robots, while Physical Intelligence, valued at $5.6 billion, supplies the AI that lets them learn and adapt to a given customer's set-up. Physical Intelligence, founded by a team from Google DeepMind, also provides software to numerous other robot makers, so the tie-up gives it out-of-the-lab data to train its models.

Competition in the broader robot empire includes France-based Exotec, whose robots climb vertical racks to retrieve items, and Amazon, which runs its own fleet alongside workers in U.S. hubs. Uber founder Travis Kalanick's new company Atoms is also pursuing non-humanoid robots for logistics.