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E-commerce has pushed the pressure of fast delivery onto the last step of fulfillment, where warehouse workers still pack most orders by hand. Third-party logistics providers feel it most, because they absorb seasonal spikes and thin margins while labor stays hard to find, and traditional automation demands weeks of integration and heavy upfront capital. Ultra builds industrial AI robots to close that gap, starting with order packaging. Its robot, Operator (OP1), arrives in a crate, plugs into a standard power outlet and Ethernet, and starts working in less than a day, powered by neural nets trained on data from robots performing real tasks. Ultra leases OP1 through a robots-as-a-service model, so warehouses pay a monthly fee instead of buying hardware, and the company reports its robots have packed more than 500,000 orders at sites in New York, Georgia, New Jersey, and Texas. Highline Commerce, a Brooklyn 3PL based in Industry City, now runs OP1 on a share of its orders, and Ultra expects to have hundreds of robots deployed in 2027. AlleyWatch sat down with Ultra CEO Jon Miller Schwartz to learn more about the business, its future plans, recent funding round, and much, much more… Who were your investors, and how much did you raise? We just closed a $50M Series A led by Framework Ventures. Before that, we raised $12M, led by Y Combinator and NextView Ventures. Tell us about the product or service that Ultra offers. Ultra builds industrial AI robots that are being used by e-commerce warehouses across the United States today. Our robots are powered by neural nets — AI trained on the data of our robots doing different tasks — which makes them more flexible than any robots that have come before. Our robot is called Operator, or OP1, and we launched it in Spring 2026. OP1 is self-contained and easy to deploy. In less than a day, we go from a robot in a crate to a robot that’s fully set up and working. That’s much easier than traditional automation has ever been. Our robots are also stationary, which makes them safer to run. They plug into any standard power outlet and Ethernet, so they don’t need to stop to recharge; they can run continuously. How is Ultra different? Ultra is different because of our deployment focus. Many robotics companies today are basically research labs, working on technology and robots that are still 5 to 10 years away from customer adoption. At Ultra, we’re taking the most mature parts of the technology and packaging them into a product that can be deployed to customers today. Strategically, rather than building a fully general-purpose robot and trying to sell it to every industry for every use case, we’re focused on the applications we see as the biggest opportunities. Our initial focus is building a robot that’s actually useful to our customers from day one. We work with third-party logistics (3PL) warehouses, and we focus primarily on order packaging — the last step of the fulfillment process. Our robots take the items people order online, like cosmetics, vitamins, apparel, electronics and home goods, and put them into the packages that get shipped to consumers. This task was previously impossible to automate, but thanks to technological breakthroughs over recent years, everything has changed. What market does Ultra target and how big is it? Right now, we’re focused on the e-commerce logistics market. There are tens of thousands of U.S. warehouses doing the types of tasks we’re targeting; the Total Addressable Market (TAM) is billions of dollars. Longer term, we’ll expand the use cases, customer profiles, and even geographic locations of the customers we go after. Ultimately,we’ll be attacking the trillion-dollar market worldwide. That’s the opportunity for robots in the coming decades. What is your business model? Today, we sell our robots through a robots-as-a-service (RaaS) model. We lease our robots to customers, who pay a monthly fee that covers the hardware, software and support. In return, they get a robot that’s productive in their facility. Using a RaaS model means our customers can try the robots without needing to invest large amounts in hardware upfront. This flexible model has seen a lot of success over the past five to 10 years, and it makes it easy for our customers to adopt robots in their warehouses. What’s your experience building this kind of tech in New York, and how does your space support it? We love being in New York City. The city has an incredible density of technical talent right now, which we love since we’re hiring a lot this year. We’re currently based at Industry City in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park. We’ve been there since 2024, and IC has made it easy for us to keep scaling. Over the years, we’ve expanded our offices, and, in the new year, we’ll move into an even larger space in IC to accommodate our growing team and robotics inventory. The set up and community at Industry City has also been great. One of our early customers, Highline Commerce, a 3PL, is actually based in Industry City, and working so closely with them made it possible for us to collaborate on robot development in real time. What was the funding process like? There’s a lot of excitement and demand to invest in robotics companies today. We were lucky to get strong investor interest because of our focus on deployment, and ultimately we decided to partner with Framework Ventures as our Series A lead. What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital? The main challenge was helping investors understand why robotics is different from software. Investors typically look at what’s happened with digital AI — OpenAI, Anthropic — as a baseline for how robotics will play out. But robots are hardware-based products that require a supply chain and production and operations support to actually deploy and run. It was our job to help investors understand those differences, and wahy Ultra is uniquely positioned to succeed. What factors about your business ultimately led your investors to write the check? Ultra’s robots are already out in the world creating value for customers. It’s that simple. We’re also unique for a modern robotics company in how customer-obsessed we are. We build deep relationships with our customers, and those relationships helped set us apart. What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months? We’re significantly growing the team (we’re hiring!) and expanding our space in Industry City to build more robots than ever. We’re focused on deploying as many robots as we can, and we’re estimating that we’ll have hundreds deployed in 2027. What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank? Make your product better, work with your customers more, and grow your company. Where do you see the company going now over the near term? Like I said, more robots — lots more robots. Robots that are faster, more reliable, and more capable, with a higher level of autonomy across our entire fleet. We’re working with some of the best robotics labs today to make our robots fully autonomous, and that’s moving very quickly. All of this will help us scale faster. What’s your favorite fall destination in and around the city? I love walking through Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in the fall, when the trees are changing colors.
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