Smart Robotics is turning warehouse picking data into a European scale-up story

Smart Robotics raised €10 million in Series A funding on April 21, 2026, giving the Dutch warehouse automation company capital to expand across Europe and continue developing its AI-driven pick-and-place systems. The round was led by Rotterdamse Havendraken, Innovation Industries, and Ernij Next.

Smart Robotics was founded on May 1, 2015 by Mark Menting and Heico Sandee, starting from a small office at the High Tech Campus Eindhoven before moving to Best in the Brainport high-tech region. Sandee's background in robotics, control systems, and Eindhoven technical networks fits the company's operating thesis: make robot workcells flexible enough for real warehouses rather than fixed around a single repeatable factory motion.

Smart Robotics brings more than a decade of deployed robotic item-picking and palletizing systems in real intralogistics environments. Its current operating base includes more than 120 systems across five industries and 15 countries, with company-reported performance of 99.5% uptime and up to 1,000 picks per hour. The company also says it has passed one billion successful picks in live production environments.

That operating data is the center of the event. Warehouse picking remains one of the more difficult areas of logistics automation because products vary by shape, packaging, weight, fragility, and presentation. A robotic cell that performs well in a controlled demo can still fail when the bin mix changes, the packaging deforms, or a warehouse operator swaps SKUs without notice. Smart Robotics is positioning its advantage around the feedback loop from deployed systems, not only the mechanical cell.

The competitive field includes robotic picking specialists such as RightHand Robotics, Berkshire Grey, and Covariant-style AI picking systems, plus AutoStore integrators such as Swisslog and Dematic that can bring robotics into larger warehouse programs. Smart Robotics' distinction is the installed base: it can point to production history and pick-level data as a training and improvement layer.

The Series A turns Smart Robotics from a mature deployment company into a European expansion story. The strategic question is whether real warehouse pick data becomes a durable advantage as logistics automation moves from fixed workflows into high-mix fulfillment. If Smart Robotics can keep performance stable across more sites and product categories, the company is not just selling robot cells; it is selling accumulated operational intelligence for warehouses that need automation to work on messy, live inventory.

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