Massachusetts-headquartered advanced robotics for material handling solutions provider Symbotic, says it has expanded its access to a wider materials handling automation market with its acquisition of Texas-founded Fox Robotics.

Fox Robotics, founded in Austin in 2017, specialises in automation and is the developer of the FoxBot ATL autonomous forklift.

The acquisition was announced on Symbotic’s Q1 2026 earnings call by founder and CEO Rick Cohen.

“We are…meeting our key objective to invest in our innovation engine to expand our capabilities,” Cohen says. “On that note, we recently closed the acquisition of Fox Robotics, a leader in autonomous forklift solutions. 

“This acquisition further enhances our strategy of utilising our software to orchestrate robots that move goods through the supply chain, from the dock door at the warehouse to the individual customer order from the store.

“We see our offerings as the future of e-commerce, as retailers are increasingly seeking to take advantage of their store footprints and localised presence to offer customers unparalleled availability and order fulfilment speed through automation.”

The value of the deal was not disclosed.

Cohen adds that the majority of Fox Robotics’ 25 customers are not Symbotic’s clients, and are “mostly doing pilots”.

“The interesting thing with Fox is our large customer has thousands of fork trucks,” Cohen says of an unnamed customer believed to be a major US retailer. “But there are lots of other customers, the CPG manufacturers, their facilities, where they actually don’t do as much manual selection, but they still move pallets from the warehouse to the trucks. 

“They unload goods to their warehouses. So what I’m excited about is that we’re looking for more opportunities to interact with customers, and acquisitions is a nice way to do it, to introduce them as we talk to their supply chain people, and we make these robots more successful.”