French Warehouse Robotics Firm Doubles Down on Atlanta With Headquarters, Showroom

Editor’s note: This article was first published in Global Atlanta, an online news publication devoted to revealing the city’s ties with the world and helping local companies navigate the global economy.

 

French warehouse automation innovator Exotec is doubling down on Atlanta, opening a new North American headquarters after reaching key sales and employment milestones in the market.

The company’s Skypod system, in which autonomous robots pick product bins from tall metal warehouse racks and deliver them to human operators for final sorting and fulfillment, has struck a nerve among corporations, the company said.

Thanks to a growing roster of sizable clients in Atlanta and beyond, Exotec recently hit $1 billion in sales and 1,000 employees worldwide.

Its new Buckhead office, a 37,000-square-foot space on Peachtree Street, is being subleased from software firm FullStory. It sits near the space Exotec initial occupied upon landing in Atlanta three years ago: a warehouse on the Armour-Ottley loop across from SweetWater Brewing.

The company is retaining this facility for parts storage and servicing the occasional robot: While the company employs technicians at each customer site to ensure smooth operations, it also ships some robots to Atlanta for more complex maintenance.

Exotec entered the U.S. market in 2021 and has doubled in size every year, Stanislas Normand, managing director for North America, told Global Atlanta.

Finding engineers and technicians is always challenging, Mr. Normand said, but helping drive the material handling industry forward has its advantages from a human resources standpoint.

“We have that robotics edge that helps to really attract talent, especially young talent out of university that have been working on robotics as part of their studies,” Mr. Normand said. “They’re attracted to our company because of the new technology and the innovation we bring to the industry.”

Georgia Tech and other local institutions have been key for a company that hires about a third of its engineers out of college, supplementing them with more experienced professionals, about 20 percent of whom have relocated to the city.

Given the rapid speed of deployment, Mr. Normand said, these new hires receive a rapid training course and are expected to work on real-world projects about a month after joining the company.

With a current Atlanta headcount of about 80, Exotec expects to see 250 people at the new office within three years as hiring accelerates, mainly in the software and hardware engineering segments.

Exotec requires a consistent in-person presence at the office, with employees given the option to work remotely a maximum two days a week. Face time is a given due to the constant training and need to instill a customer-centric, unified company culture in a high-growth environment, Mr. Normand said.

“We don’t believe that this can be achieved in a remote environment,” Mr. Normand said. “We don’t want to create silos.”

Exotec’s new office has one of three global control centers that monitor robots’ activity around the world.

A Showroom With an Office

Beyond offering a welcoming space for employees, the office will be an immersive space designed to impress customers and prospects. That includes “a floor-to-ceilling curved wall of big screens on which we will show videos that have been shot of customer systems.”

“We’re really thinking about it as a showroom with an office built around it,” Mr. Normand said.

The new space will improve upon a feature that impressed many observers during an Exotec grand opening event in 2022: a control center where robots tagged with random four-letter codes (some “forbidden words excluded”) can be tracked in real-time as they operate at about 100 customer sites around the world.

The space will be one of three such “redundant” centers in France, Japan and the United States, where teams from each location take turns keeping watch over the deployed robots while the others teams aren’t at work.

Exotec systems, sold both directly to customers and through third-party integrators, are targeted toward retail, e-commerce, health care, grocery and industrial clients, with the company counting among its customers brands like Carrefour, Monoprix, Gap Inc., Uniqlo and more.

Mr. Normand said Exotec has two types of customers — those that are used to investing in automation and appreciate the speed, flexibility and adaptability of the systems through software updates. The others are traditional manual operators who have hit a capacity wall.

Exotec’s systems don’t usually replace warehouse workers, Mr. Normand said, but instead increases output while improving working conditions for existing workers, who are still used at the end of the line.

The modularity of the systems is appealing to customers, Mr. Normand said, giving them the ability to quickly and flexibly add capacity, often within their existing real estate footprint, without huge capital outlays.

“They don’t build for their 10-year plan; they build on their 2-year plan,” he said.

Read the company news release here. Learn more about Exotec, a driver of the La French Tech community in Atlanta and a member of the French-American Chamber of Commerce Southeasthere