Bristol robotics start-up raises £140m in largest UK hardware funding round of the year

A Bristol company that builds warehouse robots has raised £140m from investors in what is believed to be the largest funding round for a British hardware start-up this year, in a deal that values the five-year-old firm at about £900m.

Harbourline, founded in 2021 by two engineers from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, makes wheeled machines that pick groceries from shelves and pack them into crates for home delivery. It has about 2,400 robots in service at distribution centres run by three of the four largest supermarket chains, and says each one replaces about 1.5 picking shifts a day.

The round was led by a European growth fund with participation from the British Business Bank’s growth capital arm and a Canadian pension fund. The company said the money would pay for a second production line at its factory in Avonmouth, taking capacity from 1,200 to 3,000 robots a year, and for 400 new jobs, roughly half of them in manufacturing.

“The temptation for a company like ours is to design the robot here and build it in Shenzhen,” said Harbourline’s chief executive, Tamsin Rourke, 38. “We looked at it hard and decided that building a machine that has to work in a British chilled warehouse at 2C, next to British workers, is something you want to do within an hour’s drive of the customer. This round lets us keep that decision.”

Harbourline’s robots are smaller and cheaper than the grid-based systems pioneered by larger rivals, and can be installed in existing warehouses without rebuilding the shelving. The company has grown revenue from £11m in 2023 to a forecast £85m this year and says it expects to be profitable in 2027.

The funding comes as the government seeks to show that its industrial strategy, which identified advanced manufacturing and robotics as priority sectors, can produce companies that scale in Britain rather than being sold to American or Japanese buyers early. British start-ups raised about £13bn in the first nine months of the year, according to data firm Beauhurst, but the share going to hardware companies remains under 10%.

Unions have expressed concern. The GMB, which represents warehouse staff at two of Harbourline’s customers, said automation had already reduced headcount at one site in the east Midlands by 300. “We are not against robots,” said regional organiser Craig Durrant. “We are against being told that the people the robots replace will all be retrained as robot technicians, when we can count the technicians on one hand.”

Rourke said the company’s customers had mostly redeployed staff to roles that required judgment, such as handling damaged goods and customer queries, and that labour shortages in warehousing were the reason supermarkets were buying. “Nobody is queuing up to work nights in a fridge,” she said.