Woven Capital
Assembly Line
Third Wave Automation Closes $27 Million Series C Funding to Scale Autonomous Forklifts
Third Wave Automation, provider of autonomous high-reach forklifts powered by Shared Autonomy, closed a $27 million Series C round led by Woven Capital, Toyota’s growth fund. Return investors Innovation Endeavors, Norwest Venture Partners and Qualcomm Ventures joined the round, bringing total capital raised to $97 million. The funding will enable Third Wave to scale its pioneering Shared Autonomy Platform, expand manufacturing of its multimode TWA Reach forklifts, and support future technology development that advances the use of autonomous forklifts in and around warehouse environments.
Third Wave Automation pioneered materials handling automation with its Shared Autonomy Platform, enabling the TWA Reach line of forklifts to operate autonomously or seek help from remote operators who can take control from the safety of their office. The platform uses machine learning to ensure forklifts continue to adapt and improve over time. The TWA Reach forklifts operate in four modes: fully autonomous, remote assist, remote operation and traditional manual operation. They are designed for high-reach applications, capable of horizontal and vertical movement of payloads, and used for end-to-end applications, from inbound, replenish and outbound tasks to all tasks in between.
The dynamic system includes the industry’s most efficient mapping solution. Using automotive-grade 3D lidar, Third Wave Automation can see from the floor to the roof and across aisles, reducing the time it takes to map fixed environments from months to days. The advanced camera warehouse perception system—including Collision Shield, the industry-leading autonomous obstacle detection system running on forklifts—provides remote operators with insights into potential obstacles and how to navigate around them, as well as better views of target pick-and-place locations than manual operators.
EneCoat Technologies Raises Series C Round, Totaling 5.5 Billion Yen
EneCoat Technologies, a leading developer of perovskite solar cells (“PSC”), announced a 5.5 billion yen Series C funding round led by Toyota’s growth fund, Woven Capital and joined by INPEX and Mitsubishi HC Capital. Existing investors Mirai Creation Fund III and Kyoto University Innovation Capital participated in the round, bringing the total funding raised to over 8 billion yen.
The new capital will be used to expand operations with a production facility, and continue to progress its PSC technology that can diversify solar supply chains, support a broad range of IoT devices and advance new mobility applications. Michiko Kato, partner at Woven Capital joins EneCoat’s Board of Directors.