Supply chain startup Slamcore raises £10.4m from ROKStar Ventures and Toyota Ventures
This article covers Slamcore, a London-based supply chain startup, raising £10.4m in a growth funding round to expand its visual AI products for intralogistics. The funding aims to accelerate deployments of its Slamcore Aware and Slamcore Alert systems to improve real-time vehicle tracking and safety across warehouses and factories, supporting operators of manual fleets.
Slamcore has raised £10.4m in a growth funding round to expand its visual AI products for intralogistics, with backing that includes ROKStar Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Rockwell Automation. The London-based supply chain startup says the new capital will accelerate deployments of its Slamcore Aware and Slamcore Alert systems, which use stereo cameras and on-device visual AI to track vehicles and monitor safety across warehouses and factories without new infrastructure.
Why it matters
Industrial sites still lack consistent, real-time visibility into manual fleets such as forklifts. That gap matters because it drives both safety incidents and lost productivity: the Occupational Safety and Health Administration estimates between 35,000 and 62,000 forklift-related injuries in the United States each year, with an average of two fatalities every week. Slamcore’s approach aims to make fleet location and behaviour visible immediately, without installing beacons, floor markers or expensive site rewires — a practical model for operators seeking incremental improvements across many facilities rather than a single large capital project.
Inside the product
Slamcore combines a stereo camera with proprietary visual AI to map vehicle position and motion in real time. Slamcore Aware provides facility-wide tracking so operations teams can measure utilisation and reduce idle time. Slamcore Alert focuses on safety, flagging risky driver behaviour and close-proximity events to prevent near misses.
The company reports rapid commercial traction: deployments across more than 30 facilities and “hundreds of units” in under two years. Slamcore positions the resulting operational datasets as an asset for training future physical AI models that can operate reliably in the messy, dynamic conditions of live warehouses and factories.
In the announcement, Owen Nicholson, CEO at Slamcore, said:
Operations managers in factories and warehouses have largely been flying blind when it comes to their manual fleets. Slamcore Aware and Slamcore Alert change that from day one, without disruption to existing operations.
Who are the investors?
The round includes ROKStar Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Rockwell Automation, alongside Toyota Ventures, Interwoven Ventures, MMC Ventures, Amadeus Capital Partners, IP Group, Samsung Ventures and Presidio Ventures.
Rockwell Automation’s involvement signals strategic interest from a major industrial automation provider; Toyota Ventures brings expertise in mobility and robotics investments; MMC Ventures is a UK-based investor known for enterprise and data-led software companies; Amadeus Capital has a track record in deep tech and AI; and IP Group specialises in commercialising university research. Together, these backers provide a mix of industrial distribution channels, domain expertise and deep-tech venture experience.
In the announcement, Ryan Gariepy, vice president of Robotics at Rockwell Automation, said:
Delivering visual AI that performs reliably at the scale and complexity of a real factory or distribution center is a genuinely hard problem. Most approaches either require significant infrastructure investment or fail to hold up in the dynamic, unpredictable conditions of an active facility. The potential for the same technology platform to work on every class of autonomous and human-operated industrial vehicle is key. We’re also incredibly excited about their ability to scale without requiring complex and time-consuming vehicle or facility redesigns.
In the announcement, Jim Adler, Founder and General Partner at Toyota Ventures, said:
At Toyota Ventures, we believe safety and efficiency go hand-in-hand. Slamcore Aware and Alert have proven this today, but their long-term potential is even more compelling. Each Slamcore deployment generates real-world operational data, which will train the next generation of physical AI models.
If you're researching potential backers in this space:
- Explore our list of supply chain venture capital firms in the UK
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Founder perspective
Nicholson frames the business as providing foundational infrastructure rather than a point solution, arguing that real-world operational datasets — produced as the technology is used across different sites and vehicle types — will be crucial to building more capable physical AI systems.
The company says the new funding brings its total disclosed capital to roughly the low tens of millions, and will be used to scale deployments, support product development and expand commercial partnerships in Europe and North America.
The bigger picture
Slamcore’s raise reflects a broader trend: operators are increasingly looking for low-friction ways to digitise the “dark” parts of their facilities, combining safety and utilisation benefits without long site roll-outs. Visual AI that runs on commodity cameras and avoids heavy infrastructure changes can be attractive to logistics providers, third-party warehouses and factory floors where downtime and retrofit costs are major barriers.
For UK and European industrial technology, the deal also highlights how corporate venture arms and traditional VCs are pooling resources to back applied AI solutions that bridge software, robotics and operations. As warehouses continue to mix human and autonomous activity, systems that reliably sense and interpret that activity will be central to incremental productivity and safety gains across the region.
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