Ultra said Friday that it raised $62 million and deepened its partnership with the AI research firm Physical Intelligence.
The Brooklyn-based startup leases its devices to warehouses under a monthly 'robots as a service' model. Its funding came in two rounds: a $50 million Series A led by Framework Ventures with participation from Y Combinator, and an earlier $12 million seed round led by Y Combinator and Next View.
Ultra CEO and co-founder Jon Miller Schwartz said humanoid robots get most of the attention, but other types of robots are having the bigger real-world impact. He pointed to Ultra's warehouse machines, which he said have packed more than half a million orders for shipping.
The company says its model lowers the capital burden for customers. Instead of requiring large upfront purchases, Ultra charges an integration fee to install the robots and then a monthly fee for hardware and software support. Schwartz said the approach has gained enough traction that Ultra has been able to raise prices.
Ultra also uses what it calls a 'body and brains' approach. The company builds and installs the robots, while Physical Intelligence supplies the AI that helps them learn and improve based on each customer's setup. Physical Intelligence is valued at $5.6 billion and was founded by a team from Google DeepMind.
The partnership reflects a clear split of labor in a business where execution matters. Ultra handles deployment and hardware, while Physical Intelligence gets operational data to train its models. Schwartz said scaling that kind of system to humanoid robots is still about five years away.
The numbers come first. Ultra's pitch is not that customers should take a leap of faith on a large capital purchase, but that they can buy productivity as a service and let the system prove itself in the warehouse. That is the kind of arrangement capital tends to reward: lower friction, faster adoption, and a direct link between software, hardware, and earnings potential.
For the market, the lesson is straightforward. Companies that remove upfront costs and tie technology to measurable output often have an easier path to scale than firms selling a futuristic vision alone. In robotics, as in most of business, free enterprise favors models that get work done and keep the cash register moving.
