Newbility raises 23 billion won in Series A funding

Newbility announced on the 27th that it recently raised 23 billion won in Series A funding.

The investment was joined by IMM Investment, Signite Partners, Lotte Ventures, Samsung Welstory, DS & Partners, KB Investment, 42dot, the SKT-Infinitum Fund, Capstone Partners, FuturePlay and Shinhan Capital. The funding is considered unusually large for a robotics startup, both in Korea and abroad.

Since launching in the Songdo area of Incheon’s Yeonsu-gu district last year, Newbility has successfully piloted autonomous robot delivery services for chicken, convenience store goods and lunch boxes in areas including Seoul’s Seocho-gu and Songpa-gu districts, leading the commercialization of robot delivery services.

This year, the company plans to improve its urban autonomous delivery robot, NEUBIE, and become the first in Korea to officially launch an outdoor robot delivery service, powered by its new platform, NEUBIEGO.

NEUBIE uses a camera-based autonomous driving solution instead of expensive LiDAR sensors, and Newbility developed the robot’s hardware in-house to secure a strong cost advantage. The robot is also optimized for autonomous delivery missions in dense urban areas such as Seoul’s Gangnam district. It recently won the iF Design Award 2022, earning recognition for its design.

Kim Hong-chan, managing director at IMM Investment, which led the round, explained the rationale for the investment: “The last-mile delivery market has enormous potential, but also many problems to solve. We believe Newbility’s technological edge will enable the team to solve these problems quickly and effectively.”

Lee Jae-shin, an executive at SK Telecom, which co-led the investment, said, “By investing in Newbility, which is developing autonomous delivery robots in the rapidly growing last-mile delivery market, we expect to create synergies with SKT across a range of areas.”

With the new funding, Newbility plans to launch a new kind of robot delivery service through NEUBIEGO, a personalized, short-distance robot delivery platform. The company intends to work with B2B partners that participated as strategic investors, including Signite Partners (Shinsegae CVC), Lotte Ventures, Samsung Welstory and 42dot, to make affordable, short-distance delivery services easily accessible to neighborhood restaurants, convenience stores and businesses that have had difficulty using delivery platforms.

Newbility also plans to ramp up hiring to accelerate its growth. This year, it will focus on adding staff for the NEUBIEGO platform, including developers with delivery platform experience and UX designers, rather than concentrating on autonomous driving and robotics talent.

Newbility CEO Lee Sang-min said, “This year, we will aggressively hire around 100 people for platform development and establish overseas subsidiaries in the United States, Japan and elsewhere. We will work to ensure delivery robots are no longer just a future technology, but a service people can use in their everyday lives anywhere in the world.”