Clearing the Docks

Not all deep tech wears its innovations on its sleeve. In some envi­ron­ments, simplicity, reliability, and seamlessly scalable solutions are required for truly trans­for­ma­tive impact. Maybe nowhere is this more true than at what Slip Robotics calls the ​“universal standard interface” of the global supply chain: the loading dock.

For over half a century, the loading and unloading of trailers has been generally resistant to improve­ments in economics and process, but Slip is signif­i­cantly changing that. Its automated loading robots are proving themselves on the docks of industry-leading companies, where they’re boosting throughput by an order of magnitude, and simul­ta­ne­ously increasing worker safety and reducing costs. In support of speeding this trans­for­ma­tion of the loading dock, DCVC is proud to lead Slip’s $28 million Series B financing round (see Axios coverage here).

Today, truckers spend nearly a quarter of their working days idling at docks waiting their turn to load and unload, while harried dock workers and forklift operators navigate an often crowded and chaotic workplace where personal injury and damage to product is always a danger. This situation burns money, spews pollution, and puts both worker safety and employer margin at risk. The SlipBot platform can enter and improve these envi­ron­ments without needing modi­fi­ca­tions to docks or trailers, or IT integration of any kind, not even WiFi. Workers can be trained in minutes to control the bots with video-game-like controllers, and the bots autonomously handle the entry and exit from the trailer, eliminating a major source of accidents and injury. 

Where before it might have taken upwards of an hour to load and unload a truck, with Slip’s technology it can now be done in five minutes, much more safely, much more cost-effectively, and with much less waste and pollution. According to a worker at Valeo, a multi-billion-dollar supplier of parts for automobile manu­fac­turers that has deployed SlipBots at its Seymour, Indiana campus, ​“It took us 30 minutes to load or unload a trailer with forklifts. Now it’s five minutes, and I don’t have any chance of a trailer pulling off and somebody getting hurt.” SlipBots deliver exactly what they promise: faster, safer, and more efficient loading dock operations.

The global supply chain sector is notable for a number of seemingly humble innovations that have completely revo­lu­tion­ized it over the decades, and we believe that Slip’s bots have the potential to do for loading dock operations what the container­iza­tion revolution did for sea freight. By one estimate, an entre­pre­neurial trucker’s idea of loading trailers directly onto ships cut freight rates from Asia to North America by 40 to 60 percent. Another example is CHEP, which just through iteratively innovating on the shipping pallet itself—new materials, new designs, and equipment pooling models — has developed into a multi-billion-dollar-a-year business for its parent company.

Through this latest round of funding, Slip will be able to scale up beyond the 100s of bots that are already working loading docks daily for industry leaders like John Deere, GE Appliances, Nissan, and Valeo, which has been able to increase throughput by 6x while decreasing traffic on its docks by 8x. As a Production Control Manager at one of Slip’s customers explained, ​“Now that we’re using SlipBots for our inbound freight, if we had to go back to the old way it would feel like going from high-speed fiber internet back to dial-up.” 

So far SlipBots have mostly been handling shipments between companies’ locations; soon they will begin moving outward en masse into the supply chain of manu­fac­turers, distrib­u­tors, and retailers, delivering value to stake­holders at every node in that chain. The global supply chain has been described as a network of networks, and with SlipBots we see the network effects of Slip’s own innovation in action.