Ultra Robotics Banks $62 Million on the Warehouse Robot That Has Already Packed Half a Million Orders

Ultra Robotics, a Brooklyn startup founded in 2024, has raised $62 million across two rounds: a $50 million Series A led by Framework Ventures with Y Combinator participating, on top of a $12 million seed round jointly led by Y Combinator and NextView Ventures. Fortune first reported the Series A figures, and SiliconANGLE confirmed the round the same day.

What Ultra sells is deliberately unglamorous. The OP1 Operator is a stationary, dual-arm robot that looks like a humanoid upper body mounted on the end of a robotic arm, fitted with a pair of grippers shaped like forklift prongs. It has a 5-by-5-foot footprint, a work area of up to 10 by 10 feet, a vertical reach of 10 feet for shelf picking, and arms that each carry up to 10 pounds. There is no engine and no battery: workers roll the unit between stations by hand, the wheels lock in place so it cannot tip over, and it draws power from a standard wall outlet. A second cable connects it to the local network.

The machine handles the middle of e-commerce fulfillment that is hard to automate and harder to staff. It decants mixed inbound containers into bins of a single type, performs kitting — combining items from different containers into one parcel — and finishes the job by placing items into envelopes or plastic bags, sealing them and applying shipping labels. If an item falls to the floor, the robot can retrieve that too. Ultra leases the hardware under a robots-as-a-service model: an upfront integration fee, then recurring fees for hardware and software support.

The traction numbers carry more weight than the round size. Ultra says its fleet has packed more than 500,000 orders across sites in New York, Georgia, New Jersey and Texas, that a single unit can process up to 1,000 items per day, and that setup takes hours because its AI models need little customer configuration. At Highline Commerce in Brooklyn, Ultra robots reportedly handle up to 30 percent of that company's fulfillment volume. The company says demand has been strong enough that it has raised prices — an unusual move for a young hardware business.

The capital arrives alongside a deepened partnership with Physical Intelligence, the San Francisco firm whose robot foundation models run on Ultra's systems. Physical Intelligence was valued at $5.6 billion after a $600 million Series B in November 2025, and its π0.6 model reportedly reached 96.4% autonomy over full shifts in real warehouse settings, based on deployment data the company released in February. Sensor data from each OP1 flows back to Ultra to retrain its models, which makes every deployed unit a data collection rig that pays for itself while it learns.

The pitch cuts against the humanoid narrative that dominates robotics funding. While bipedal startups compete on demo videos, Ultra shipped something a warehouse manager can approve: no batteries to charge, no autonomous navigation to certify, no fall risk on a 10-foot platform. "The robots that are actually changing the world are the ones doing valuable work for real people," founder and CEO Jon Miller Schwartz said. Whether the durable moat is the forklift-prong gripper or the half-million-order dataset behind it, the round was priced on operational evidence rather than a roadmap.