How Fox Robotics went from scrappy startup to making self-driving forklifts for Walmart
In 2018, Peter Anderson-Sprecher moved to Texas to join a group of engineers working out of a garage in an Austin suburb. They had one goal: to make a forklift that could drive itself.
Six years later, that team, called Fox Robotics, has landed partnerships with some of the biggest retail and logistics companies in the world and tens of millions in funding. Its investors have ranged from California venture capital firm Menlo Ventures, which provided $9 million in Series A funding in 2020, to automaker BMW’s i Ventures, which led a $20 million funding round in 2022.
Fox’s forklifts unload the trailers used to carry products between warehouses and stores, automating one of the key functions of the shipping and receiving dock. The forklifts being sold to customers now do not yet do the reverse task of autonomously loading trailers, but tests just started on this capability and it is set to launch in 2025.
“It’s a highly manual, cluttered, chaotic environment where machines and humans zip around in sort of unpredictable vectors,” Fox Robotics CEO Marin Tchakarov, who joined the company from Kindred Systems at the start of 2023, told Modern Retail. “That makes it a very difficult environment to automate, and that is the challenge.”
The team got its first prototypes running at the end of 2019 and had its first commercial launch in 2021. Many of the company’s clients are confidential, though in addition to Walmart, other publicly announced customers include logistics giant DHL and Atlanta Bonded Warehouse Corporation, a distribution services company in Georgia.
In April, Fox Robotics announced a multi-year partnership with Walmart for 19 additional forklifts after a 16-month proof of concept and that the retailer obtained a minority interest in the company. Two months later, Reuters reported that Walmart would potentially buy hundreds of forklifts or “FoxBots” from Fox Robotics through a $200 million deal — though neither Fox nor Walmart have yet confirmed the deal.
More than 45% of Walmart’s e-commerce fulfillment center volume in the U.S. is now automated and about 1,800 Walmart stores receive freight from 15 regional distribution centers in various phases of automation implementation, Walmart CFO John David Rainey told investors Aug. 15. “As a result, our supply chain teams are processing more units through our [distribution centers] and [fulfillment centers], and while we’re spending more on CapEx than we have historically, we’re pleased with the returns from these investments,” he said.
About 110 FoxBots have been installed at around 55 warehouses and distribution centers across the U.S., including cold storage and freezer facilities. Customers range across four B-to-B verticals: retail, consumer packaged goods, logistics and food and beverage. The company also plans to embark on selling robots to manufacturing clients like BMW, Tchakarov said.
To further grow and expand its supply chain, Fox signed a nonexclusive deal with South Carolina-based Kion North America to manufacture the forklifts. Currently, Fox buys forklifts from other companies and ships them to Austin to equip them with automation.
Fox’s machines have so far made around 4.2 million autonomous pulls, each of which gives the company a treasure trove of information; any time the artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms degrade in performance or speed, its data annotation team will review the logs and images and try to discern why it struggled with a specific pull. Thus, the more FoxBots work, the more data the company has to work with to further improve its technology and expand further.
Filling a gap in warehousing
Before joining Fox, Anderson-Sprecher spent about six years in Google’s research and robotics divisions in the San Francisco Bay Area after studying robotics at Carnegie Mellon University.
Among other projects, he worked with Industrial Perception — a company Google acquired in 2013 that unloaded cases from trailers using a big robotic arm with a conveyor belt on the back. That introduced him to the opportunities of modern robotics in warehousing and logistics. He said one of the founders of Industrial Perception clued him into the idea of autonomous forklifts as an untapped market.
“That was sort of the seed crystal for thinking about autonomous forklifts and how those could come to bear,” said Anderson-Sprecher, now chief technology officer for Fox Robotics.
Also at Google, Anderson-Sprecher met Charles DuHadway, who would become his co-founder at Fox and would later leave the company and join Icon, which uses 3D-printing robotics to build homes. They quickly zoned in on loading/unloading dock automation as a clear gap in the market.
“With recent advances, particularly in things like machine learning, we believed rightly that this was a now-solvable problem,” Anderson-Sprecher said.
Changing the industry
The addition of automation technology within warehouses could fundamentally transform how these facilities function and could have big implications for warehouse workers and employers.
Fox is one of many technology companies working to automate warehouses for retailers.
Amazon, for example, has made strides in this area, and five years ago invested in Balyo, a French startup developing self-driving forklifts. Symbotic, another company that has worked with Walmart, makes machines that organize products onto the pallets that are delivered to stores, unlike Fox, which focuses on automating the loading and unloading docks. Other companies also produce self-driving forklifts, such as Vecna Robotics and Rockwell Automation’s Otto Motors.
Big-box retailers and grocers have also made major investments in automation over the years. Kroger partnered with British tech company Ocado in 2018 to open automated facilities for grocery orders. In 2022, for example, Walmart agreed to acquire Alert Innovation, which develops material-handling technology for order fulfillment in retail supply chains.
“All the bigger retailers like Kroger, etc., are doing automation because it’s more efficient from a fulfillment standpoint; it’s faster, and it’s less prone to errors from manual labor,” said Mickey Chadha, vp of corporate finance for Moody’s Ratings, adding that it could also help retailers reduce labor costs. “I don’t think that it’s going to be at a level where you’re going to see a massive reduction in labor force, but it definitely will be using labor in a more efficient manner.”
Tchakarov said self-driving forklifts won’t cut jobs but could ease labor shortages in warehouses by requiring fewer human employees and being able to run consistently for 18 to 20 hours. People already trained to drive forklifts are equally qualified to operate Fox’s forklifts, Tchakarov said. Whereas one forklift driver may manage one forklift, a self-driving forklift supervisor can now manage six vehicles at once.
“Many of our customers have been struggling for years to attract, to retain, to hire the workforce needed in order to operate,” Tchakarov said, adding that these jobs can be mundane and repetitive. “It’s a world where we’re honestly stepping into that vacuum rather than anything else and stabilizing the set of operations with existing people in them.”
“The world is in a quest to automate,” Tchakarov said. “I fully expect, five years from now, to see probably a majority of the forklift systems be built with some high degree of automation, if not fully autonomous.”