U.S. company Soft Robotics has raised US$20 million in a recent funding round, with investors including Hyperplane Venture Capital, Taylor Farms Ventures and ABB Technology Ventures.

Soft Robotics, which spun out of the Whitesides Group at Harvard University, claims its soft gripping systems can grasp and manipulate items "with the same dexterity of the human hand."

"We're proud of the team's work to date to scale up the Soft Robotics' technology platform and gain significant commercial traction across our customer verticals," said Soft Robotics CEO Carl Vause.

"We've been able to address some of our customers' largest supply chain and automation challenges, from picking and packing fresh produce and raw proteins, to bin picking and retail order fulfillment."

ABB, a leader in robotics and industrial automation, sees the investment in Soft Robotics as part of ABB's overall strategy to shape the future of industrial digitalization and the automated warehouse.

"We saw early on that the Soft Robotics solution is a paradigm shift in the way our machines interact with their environment, especially in their ability to grasp deformable, delicate, binned or otherwise complex items," said Grant Allen, Head of Ventures at ABB Group.

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