Fulfillment has been a huge area of growth in the robotics industry, with innovations in packing, picking and transporting goods bringing efficiencies to a range of industries continuing to struggle with labor shortages and high levels of online orders.

With more and more companies seeing increased demand for automated solutions targeting these tasks, Pickle Robot has raised $26 million for its pipeline of truck unloading robots, with live pilots underway in the greater Los Angeles area.

The company combines AI software, computer vision and sensor technology to create its robots, which work autonomously to unpack trailers, trucks and containers, a labor-intensive task that is a common cause of workplace injury and is becoming increasingly difficult to staff.

“Unloading freight from trucks and containers is a difficult, sometimes dangerous, and always tedious task that is performed in thousands of locations every day,” said Omar Asali, a member of Pickle Robot’s board of directors. “Operators around the globe are having difficulty filling positions to do this type of work, and Pickle is delivering a real robotic unload system that can help fill the labor gap plaguing the logistics industry.”

Pickle says the latest funding round will be used to expand the company’s market reach and deployment capabilities

“Customer interest in Pickle unload systems has been incredibly strong, and now that we have our initial unload systems out of the lab and into customer operations, we have a clear path to broad commercialization,” said AJ Meyer, Pickle Robot founder and CEO. “The early customer deployments, financing, and leadership additions set the stage for us to accelerate customer acquisition and build the company infrastructure we need to deliver more systems to more customers in the coming months.”

The round was led by Ranpak, JS Capital, Schusterman Family Investments, Catapult Ventures and Soros Capital, with participation from Pickle Robot’s previous investors, Toyota AI Ventures, Third Kind Venture Capital, Hyperplane Ventures, BoxGroup and Version One Ventures.