Exotec's climbing-robot bet: Skypod density wins Decathlon, $2B valuation

Sells warehouse automation built on climbing Skypod robots, from single-site systems to multi-site 'Skyfleet' rollouts for global retailers.

Goods-to-person robots that climb racks — not just roll on floors — unlock the storage density to automate the entire flow of goods in a standard warehouse.

About $90M raised before the $335M Series D in January 2022, led by Goldman Sachs Growth Equity, valuing the company at $2 billion.

Romain Moulin and Renaud Heitz founded Exotec in France in 2015 after seeing the core inefficiency of conventional warehouses: shelves sit at human height, so pickers walk up to ten kilometers a day and storage density stays low. Their answer was a low-profile robot that climbs a proprietary rack system to bring bins to people.

TechCrunch covered a $17.7M round in 2018, then $90M in 2020 as Gap tested the system for returns. In January 2022 the $335M Series D, led by Goldman Sachs Growth Equity, put the valuation at $2 billion with Uniqlo and Carrefour live. Decathlon's Montreal site ran 55 Skypods handling 8 million items a year, and the company planned to hire 500 engineers by 2025 for its North America push.

Climbing racks instead of spreading on the floor tripled usable storage density, attacking the real cost driver in warehousing: space and walking time, not pick speed alone.

The system was designed as a standardized product, so each new warehouse is a repeat of the last one instead of a bespoke engineering project.

Landing Decathlon — the world's largest sporting goods retailer — across seven sites turned one customer into a public, measurable proof of scale.

It stayed hardware-first while competitors pitched humanoids: the Skypod is boring, fast and already deployed at millions of items per site per year.

In warehouse automation, density is the product. Exotec won by making robots climb instead of sprawl — one architectural decision that cut space, walking and cost at once.

As of 2026-09-11 Exotec is private, valued at $2 billion since its January 2022 Series D, and rolling out multi-site programs for global retailers. Decathlon's seven-site European network is the reference deployment, Korea's Musinsa has installed Skypods, and CEO Romain Moulin says the company can start a new warehouse every four months. The company still reinvests at least 10% of sales into R&D, extending from storage robots toward automating the entire flow of goods from arrival to shipment.