Plus One Robotics is still riding the wave of automation that’s remaking warehouses and other logistics operations.
For the second time in less than a year, CEO and co-founder Erik Nieves is looking to expand the company’s Port San Antonio headquarters.
In May, Plus One doubled its space by 15,000 square feet at the Southwest Side port. “And now we’re still tight,” Nieves said. “We’ve already started work on the next expansion.”
Plus One makes software that increases the number of tasks that warehouse robots can perform, and its business is booming.
Apart from adding space, the tech firm has beefed up its staff count over the past year from 42 to 70 in the U.S. and Europe, increased its presence in Boulder, Colo., and established engineering, sales and support teams in the Netherlands.
Last spring, Plus One raised $33 million from investors and is working on a major deal with FedEx, one of its biggest customers.
Erik Nieves, Plus One Robotics CEO and co-founder, speaks Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2019 before the ribbon cutting of the company’s new 11,000 square foot facility at Port San Antonio.
William Luther, Staff / Staff
Plus One “is one of San Antonio’s most successful technology startups ever,” said Paco Felici, spokesman for Port San Antonio. “It’s become the standard of robotics innovation.”
The 5-year-old company is one of a handful of San Antonio robotics firms — albeit the most prominent — that are booming amid the pandemic. Companies are increasingly turning to automation deal with labor shortages, including workers sick with COVID-19, and to minimize the risk that virus will invade their workplaces.
The fast spread of the omicron variant is expected to reinforce that trend.
The look ahead
Nieves declined to discuss details of Plus One’s new project with FedEx, except to say the logistics giant “continues to invest in robotics.”
He’s also looking to break into automation markets in Asia in the near future. He said two one of Plus One’s investors, Translink Ventures of Silicon Valley and McRock Capital of Calgary, Canada, have the expertise to help the company enter the massive market.
Despite the success, the company didn’t meet its goal of hiring 100 employees by the end of the year. Tech companies are battling for workers, especially as large companies such as Tesla, the electric vehicle maker co-founded and led by billionaire Elon Musk, moved into the region.
Tesla is building a $1 billion Cybertruck plant in Austin and is moving its headquarter from Palo Alto, Calif., to the Texas capital.
“People have options,” Nieves said. “Lots of people in Texas were excited for Tesla coming in, but for us as a technology company, that’s just another big player that we have to compete in the market with for labor.”
Still, Nieves expects to reach 100 employees in 2022.
“It remains to be seen how many of them will be local, but the bulk will always be at the headquarters in San Antonio,” he said.
Robots are here to stay
In 2016, Nieves teamed up with Shaun Edwards, a former research engineer at San Antonio’s Southwest Research Institute, to create Plus One Robotics. The following year, Paul Hvass, another one-time SwRI research engineer, came on board as the third co-founder of the startup.
The trio’s motto remains: “Robots work. People rule.”
Plus One has developed “supervisor software” named Yonder to “give robots the eye-hand coordination to pick and place objects in the warehouses and distribution centers using 3D and AI-powered perception, so robots get smarter over time,” the company says on its website.
Essentially, the software enables robots to pick up packages, move them and set them down in a new location such as a pallet or a conveyor belt. Human workers can remotely manage up to 50 robots at a time.
Nieves said Plus One Robotics — which is privately held and doesn’t publicly disclose its financial results — has generated consistent revenue growth, and there’s no indication it’ll slowing down. In a recent blog post on the company’s website, he noted that customers took “a wait-and-see position” in the first half of 2021 but booked “a giant wave” of orders over the last six months.
They couldn’t “afford to sit and wait, regardless of the global situation,” he wrote. They needed “to get things moving, to keep warehouses pumping” to meet the growing demands for e-commerce, the buying and selling of products over the internet.
“The robots definitely didn’t take a break,” he wrote.
Xenex, the 13-year-old maker of germ-killing robots, also has significantly increased sales since the onset of the pandemic in March 2020 — because of COVID-19 outbreak.
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Xenex CEO and co-founder Morris Miller said his company doubled revenue in 2020 from the year before. Xenex is privately owned and doesn’t publicly disclose detailed financial results.
Hospitals and health care clinics, including the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis, Minn., are among the biggest customers for its robots, which zap germs with waves of ultraviolet light, including the coronavirus.
“We’ve sold a lot of robots, and the business continues to help hospitals,” said Miller, a co-founder of Rackspace Technology, the homegrown cloud-computing company. “We continue to see a lot of pull.”
The governments of Italy and Japan are also Xenex customers.
In 2021, Miller said the company has deployed “thousands” more robots to more than 900 health care facilities in 37 countries.
The CEO said clients who recently have placed orders haven’t said whether it’s because of the rise in cases of omicron infections, a variant that spreads more easily than the original coronavirus. “But clearly, there’s another uptick happening right now,” he said. “With a few more days in the year, how much more pull will we get?”
Robots taking over?
Unlike humans, the robots don’t catch the flu or COVID-19, and they don’t get health benefits or vacation.
For employers — who are struggling with labor shortages and sick employees in the short term, and are looking to make their operations more efficient in the long term — bringing in robots or increasing their reliance on automation can be an attractive option.
About one quarter of U.S. jobs will be at high risk of takeover by automation between now and 2030, according to a report by the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution. In the same time period, 36 percent of jobs “will experience medium exposure to automation.”
Yet Plus One’s Nieves said he doesn’t believe robots will crowd out humans in the workplace. His company is landing a lot of deals, but that doesn’t mean his clients will stop hiring people.
In fact, he sees a shortage in the U.S. labor market.
His company recently announced new research findings — from a commissioned study by England-based Interact Analysis, a marketing research firm — that estimated the number of warehouse workers will increase from 1.6 million in 2019 to 2 million in 2024. Europe is expected to increase its warehouse workforce from 2.5 million to 3.1 million over the same time.
Nieves said his company sees “first-hand the challenges our customers are facing to meet labor shortages, and this research confirms that even with the forecast levels of automation, we’ll need more humans in the loop.”
The robots, he said, will perform repetitive tasks such as “de-palletizing” — the removal and placement of products on warehouse pallets. It’s a job usually measured in tons.
So, where do humans fit into the largely automated warehouse? It’ll be less about physical labor than about the know-how to oversee the robots’ work.
At Xenex, Morris said its disinfecting robots don’t cut workers out of the picture. He cited hospitals as an example of how robots and employees work together.
“There needs to be a human housekeeper to roll the robot into the rooms and move them to the beds and flip them,” he said. “A combination of humans and robots are the best way to get things down.”
“Housekeepers need robots,” he said. “They’ve become part of the team.”