Mytra has developed a new concept for storing and retrieving items in the warehouse. The company is positioning its system as “three-dimensional robotics” in a reference to its ability to move full pallets in any direction throughout a custom storage array.
South San Francisco-based Mytra launched today with $78 million in total financing through the Series B stage and several commercial partners. Founded by former Tesla and Rivian robotics and manufacturing leaders, the company said it will automate the most common industrial task: moving and storing material.
According to Mytra, 85% of global gross domestic product is attributed to physical goods. Labor shortages and other pressures on manufacturing and supply chains “have made it clear that the legacy way of operating warehouses — with people and forklifts — needs to change,” it said.
Mytra adds a dimension to storage and retrieval
Imagine a 3D Kiva-style materials handling system, and you have Mytra’s offering. The Mytra Bot acquires and moves cell trays in the X, Y, or Z direction throughout a custom racking system in a warehouse.
This is a novel implementation of an automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS), where the system can move cell trays loaded with full pallets weighing up to 1,360 kg (3,000 lb.).
Mytra said its robots enable goods-to-person and goods-to-robot workflows, as well as the buffering of pallets in a cross-docking facility. The setup can also operate like a super-sized putwall for full pallet loads.
The state of the art for pallet storage today is to place full pallet loads onto multi-level racking using either manual or autonomous high-lift fork trucks. With this storage and retrieval method, the pallets are always acquired from an existing aisleway.
The Mytra storage racking can be configured to fit into any existing warehouse footprint and can make the cell trays accessible from any location around the foot of the storage array. This enables manually driven forklifts, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), or autonomous fork trucks to easily get and put the pallet loads into and out of the structure, the company claimed.
New material flow is configurable
“Material flow makes up the lion’s share of the work in a warehouse but is still largely done the same way it was a century ago,” said Chris Walti, co-founder and CEO at Mytra. “This is because the alternatives are too complex, have too many parts, and are customized for specific applications.”
“We’re taking a radically different approach by reducing the number of parts and moving the focus from hardware to software,” he explained. “We are the first and only solution that can universally automate many of the most labor-intensive, costly, and complex aspects of material flow, which are the ‘red blood cells’ of any industrial operation.” “
“Mytra enables infinite ways to move, store, and retrieve materials, changing applications instantly — all of which are controlled by software” Walti asserted. “This will drive massive efficiencies not only within warehouses, but also in adjacent transportation and manufacturing operations.”
According to Waiti, Mytra’s system is better than a traditional ASRS in several ways:
- It provides more flexibility and kinematic freedom, allowing the system to morph between high-density and high-velocity configurations using the same hardware.
- It has a simpler hardware design with fewer mechanical parts, reducing complexity and potential points of failure compared with traditional automated storage.
- It can be deployed incrementally and scaled up more easily, rather than requiring a large upfront investment to overhaul an entire warehouse.
- The modular design allows the system to be shaped and configured to fit the specific needs and layout of a customer’s warehouse, rather than being limited to fixed infrastructure.
Like existing ASRS offerings, Mytra requires warehouse floor space to be dedicated to its storage matrix. However, it said the 3D accessibility of the Mytra Bot shuttles enables optimization of the warehouse floorspace since intra-storage aisles are eliminated. The system reserves the topmost level for unfettered robot movement, and it can reconfigure the array for the optimal item movement at any time.
Mytra builds for scalability, a range of goods
Mytra said its robots and racking can be deployed incrementally. Customers can start by allocating a few traditional racking rows and then expand as the system proves itself.
Another novel design element is that the cell trays can be configured for many different containers, from a basic pallet to multi-shelf, bin, or tote-carrying designs. The cell trays themselves are a standard design, and anything can be placed onto or built into the cell tray for storage and retrieval.
Waiti said he expects Mytra’s storage approach to be viable for both work in process and finished goods for manufacturers of hard goods, large appliances, and automotive parts. The Mytra cell tray is key to the configurability of the physical design of the solution, he told Automated Warehouse.
‘Software-defined warehousing’ debuts
Mytra called its storage methodology “software-defined warehousing” (SDW), because a warehouse execution system (WES) is at the heart of its system, tracking the current storage slot for any pallet/cell.
The software also manages the operation of all of the Mytra Bots. It optimizes the location of “climbing tunnels” and the occupancy of storage slots so that high-priority items are easily accessible when required.
“The businesses and verticals that we’ve had the most traction with are the ones that have very vast networks move a lot of pallets, and they move them at higher velocities,” said Waiti. “There are diversified retailers that have a lot of pallets, with a lot of cases, and either ship them to other businesses or directly to consumers.”
Early partners expect rapid returns
Mytra has already deployed its system in production at select Albertsons Cos. distribution centers. It said this use case is an easy beachhead for its automation because it can easily handle unit pallet loads or work with palletizing robots to configure custom pallet loads for distribution.
“Warehouses are the backbone of the global economy,” said Neil Shah, a partner at investor Greenoaks. “Yet the vast majority of the world’s warehouses remain manual, and even those that are automated remain too complex and too rigid to meet the challenges of modern supply chains.”
“By creating a software-defined automation system, Mytra abstracts away the complexity of hardware, increases density, dramatically boosts throughput, and delivers a resilient system that can adapt as quickly as customer needs change,” he said.
Eclipse, which led Mytra’s seed and Series A rounds, also participated. 515 Ventures, which is led by Frederic Kerrest, co-founder and chairman of Okta, and others also contributed to the Series B round.
Mytra said it plans to use its latest investment to grow its team, scale to meet customer demand, and deploy its technology to help leading companies automate tasks that are currently labor-intensive.