Slamcore Ltd. last week raised $14 million in funding round from investors including ROKStar Ventures, a subsidiary of Rockwell Automation, a global leader in industrial automation and digital transformation.
“Operations managers in factories and warehouses have largely been flying blind when it comes to their manual fleets,” stated Owen Nicholson, CEO of Slamcore. “Slamcore Aware and Slamcore Alert change that from Day 1, without disruption to existing operations.”
“ROKStar Ventures’ investment tells us that the industry’s most sophisticated players see this as a foundational infrastructure, not just another point solution,” he added. “As our footprint grows, so does a body of real-world operational data that does not exist anywhere else and that will become the backbone for the next generation of physical AI.”
Tech designed to boost productivity without added risk
The investment arrives as global industrial operators face an urgent dual challenge: the need for productivity gains amid rising safety risks on factory and warehouse floors, noted Slamcore.
Despite significant investment in automation, many facilities remain digitally dark regarding their manual fleets, asserted the London-based company. According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, between 35,000 and 62,000 forklift-related injuries occur each year in the U.S., resulting in an average of two fatalities every week.
This safety risk exists alongside significant inefficiency, with forklifts being productive for less than half of their total operating time. Despite heavy technology investment, most sites still lack real-time visibility into vehicle location and performance, Slamcore said.
Using a stereo camera and proprietary visual AI, Slamcore said its technology continuously tracks the position and behavior of any vehicle in a facility without GPS, beacons, floor markers, or any other infrastructure.
Slamcore Aware gives operations managers facility-wide visibility of every vehicle, enabling smarter utilization, faster investigations, and meaningful reductions in idle time, it said. Slamcore Alert monitors driver behavior and proximity to pedestrians and structures, catching near misses before they become incidents.
Rockwell explains investment in Slamcore
The round brings Slamcore’s total funding to date to $40 million. It includes backing from Toyota Ventures, Interwoven Ventures, MMC Ventures, Amadeus Capital Partners, and IP Group.
“Delivering visual AI that performs reliably at the scale and complexity of a real factory or distribution center is a genuinely hard problem,” said Ryan Gariepy, vice president of robotics at Rockwell Automation. “Most approaches either require significant infrastructure investment or fail to hold up in the dynamic, unpredictable conditions of an active facility.”
“The potential for the same technology platform to work on every class of autonomous and human-operated industrial vehicle is key,” he said. “We’re also incredibly excited about their ability to scale without requiring complex and time-consuming vehicle or facility redesigns.”