Artificial intelligence seems to be built into every startup pitching itself to investors and clients today.
But some companies have already managed to convince investors that the technology they’re selling can make a real impact, thus scoring millions on millions to keep building, broaden their teams and expand into new geographies.
Sourcing Journal tracks startups’ moves, and their influences on the industry, throughout the year. It seems that, in 2025, investors had a particular interest in warehouse and logistics use cases. Physical AI—which helps physical machines perceive real-world happenings and act on them autonomously—also captured much attention.
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While the Sourcing Journal team has covered myriad companies grabbing capital infusions this year, the five below were some of the most intriguing raises of 2025.
Contoro Robotics
Austin, Tex.-based Contoro Robotics scored a $12 million Series A round in March for its AI-powered robots, which have the capability to unload parcels situated inside trucks and containers.
Investors included Doosan, Coupang, Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, IMM, SV Investment, KB Investment, Kakao Ventures and Future Play. The company had previously raised $10 million.
Contoro uses sensors and cameras to help guide its robotic arms, which have special gripping capabilities that enable them to suction boxes from the sides, rather than only the top. That, it noted on its site, is particularly useful in containers, where the tops of boxes are typically inaccessible to begin.
The company said at the time that it would use the capital injection to expand into new markets, launch a palletization system and scale its unloading robot fleet. Customers pay a per-container fee to Contoro, rather than a flat rate.
Contoro believes its robotics can help tackle cost and labor challenges in warehouses, distribution centers and fulfillment centers. The robots take a human-in-the-loop approach, which it contends yields higher accuracy and safety.
Mok Yun, CEO and founder of Contoro, said in March he believes the company’s technology has the power to change workers’ lives for the better.
“Unloading trailers is one of the most physically demanding jobs in the warehouse, yet it remains largely manual,” Yun said in a statement. “We’re bringing AI-powered automation that enhances reliability, safety, and efficiency—allowing warehouse teams to shift from hazardous, repetitive tasks to more strategic and value-added roles.”
Dexory
London-based warehouse automation startup Dexory announced in October that it had secured $165 million in Series C funding.
A spokesperson for the startup said $100 million of the $165 million round came from venture capital. Dexory took the other $65 million as growth debt financing. On the venture funding side, Eurazeo’s growth team led the round, with further participation from LTS Growth, Endeavor Catalyst, DTCP, Atomico, Lakestar, Elaia, Latitude Ventures and Wave-X.
Dexory has developed proprietary technology called DexoryView, which leverages autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) embedded with sensors to collect data, create a warehouse digital twin and share real-time insights about inventory. The system has the ability to show warehouse operators how much of the warehouse is occupied, whether products and pallets are in the right location, how storage conditions seem and more.
According to Dexory’s site, DexoryView’s robots can scan more than 10,000 locations every hour to monitor conditions and inventory, consequently allowing warehouse customers to achieve 99.9 percent inventory accuracy.
Dexory said it would use the round to “bring forward transformational capabilities” to its customers, the likes of which include third-party logistics giants Maersk, GXO, DB Schenker and DHL.
Jinga told Sourcing Journal Dexory will more than double its headcount in the next year, which will help it place an onus on accelerating DexoryView’s development.
“We are building AI systems that can perceive, decide and act independently, helping warehouses move from intelligent to fully adaptive operations. Our priority is to enhance predictive and prescriptive capabilities so warehouses can self-optimize, anticipate challenges and coordinate tasks between people, machines and systems in real time,” she said.
Dyna Robotics
California-based startup Dyna Robotics announced in September that it had raised $120 million in Series A funding.
Robostrategy, CRB and First Round Capital led the round, with further participation from Salesforce Ventures, the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, Samsung Next, LG Technology Ventures and NVentures, which is Nvidia’s venture capital arm.
Dyna creates robotic foundation models, which it inputs into general-purpose robots. Foundation models are typically trained on mass amounts of data and information, but lack the training for a specific use case; that in mind, Dyna’s robots use the knowledge the foundation model has been trained on to adapt to real-world scenarios.
The company’s founders believe that flexibility gives Dyna the opportunity to enter many industries without the need for extra training.
The company said it would use its Series A capital to add heads to its research and engineering teams and to fasttrack the further refinement of its foundation model as it adds commercial clients to its roster.
About a month after securing a $23.5 million seed round in the spring, Dyna announced that it had launched Dynamism v1 (DYNA-1), which is the foundation model that currently powers its stationary robotic arms. Because the robots leverage DYNA-1, they’re considered general-purpose robots and can learn new skills as they go.
Dyna said its robots can operate for more than 24 hours consecutively, which means the machines can operate autonomously while humans are off the clock. While the robots may take more time to handle a task than their human counterparts, they can operate while humans are away from a facility.
York Yang, co-founder of Dyna, said that capability bodes well in industries seeing labor shortages.
“Right now, three forces are colliding at once: AI breakthroughs are maturing, hardware is accelerating and the demand for labor has never been higher. That convergence has created a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” Yang said earlier this year.
Shippeo
Shippeo, which focuses on real-time visibility in transportation, announced in January it had raised a $30 million strategic funding round. Toyota’s fund Woven Capital led the round, which also saw participation from Battery Ventures, Partech, NGP Capital, Bpifrance Digital Venture, LFX Venture Partners, Shift4Good and Yamaha Motor Ventures.
Shippeo helps companies make their supply chains more sustainable and resilient by enabling clients insight into their carbon footprint data, no matter which mode of transportation they’re interested in using for a shipment. From there, they can make decisions about the carbon trade-offs between shipment methods. The company, which was founded over 10 years ago, has secured more than $140 million in total funding.
As of January, Shippeo had already tracked more than 90 million shipments for brands across 150 countries. The Paris-based company said at the time that it would use the strategic funding round to aid the further development of its visibility platform and support its continued expansion throughout North America and the APAC region.
Prashant Bothra, principal at Woven Capital, said the fund believes the Shippeo solution has the potential to change how supply chains operate in an unprecedented way, on a global scale.
“Global supply chains are facing unprecedented complexity, and real-time transport visibility is essential for building resilience,” Bothra said in a January statement. “Shippeo’s platform empowers businesses to proactively address disruptions by transforming fragmented operations into streamlined, data-driven processes across all transport modes, offering precise tracking and predictive ETAs at scale—capabilities that would be resource-intensive to develop in-house.”
Voxel
Voxel announced in early June that it had secured a $44 million Series B round, led by NewRoad Capital Partners with further participation from Eclipse, Rite Hite, Tokio Marine, MTech, HG Ventures and Whitestone.
The San Francisco-based startup uses computer vision to help companies identify real-time employee safety hazards in warehouses, at ports and in manufacturing facilities.
Computer vision uses hardware—like cameras, in this case—and pairs their input with an AI algorithm to identify irregularities or violations. In the case of a warehouse, a safety violation could be a forklift operator failing to come to a complete stop, which is identified by the computer vision system and reported back to managers as necessary.
The idea is that, particularly in the case of repeat issues, operators can intervene, lowering the risk of injuries by creating new protocols or adding equipment to help workers complete their work with less strain.
Vernon O’Donnell, the company’s CEO, said Voxel is a strong example of using technology to enrich humans’ lives and do good.
“A lot of companies love to talk about their mission, but ours is to actually save lives. We can help somebody prevent a fatality or a catastrophic injury, and I think it’s incumbent on the entire tech community to start thinking differently on how we do more for these workers that are so critical for the next phase of re-industrialization and the next phase of our economy,” O’Donnell said.
The company, which has now amassed $61 million total in funding, counts Macy’s, Dick’s Sporting Goods and the Port of Virginia among its customers.
O’Donnell said the team planned to use the Series B to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams; the company planned to add eight to 10 engineers, as well as leadership to support them.
On the technical side, those engineers were set to focus on higher latency, which could result in stronger real-time insights. They will also work to build infrastructure that can support global needs.
